Three years ago, I graduated from my MFA program. I wanted to hit the ground running, so right from the start, I crafted myself a ritual: around the first of each month, I’d spend a morning scouring listservs and social media for writing opportunities.

I tracked submissions calls, literary magazines, scholarships, and fellowships. On a massive spreadsheet I noted dates and fees. I even drafted outlines to scholarship questions ranging from the specific How will this fellowship benefit your writing? to the vague Give us a sense of where you are, right now, as a writer.

For the first time I asked myself, outside of the structures of school or work, what kind of writer I wanted to be.

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It was the tail end of the 1970s, I was nineteen, and my girlfriend was about to be thrown out of Britain by the immigration authorities because she carried a Spanish passport with an expired visa. Spain, unlike the Britain of the time, wasn’t yet in whatever the European Union was called back then. So, we got married, but didn’t tell our respective families because we didn’t believe in marriage as such and simply wanted a stamp on her passport. We got it, and that was supposed to be that.

Only it wasn’t: six months later, she told her sister that we were married, and her sister told everybody else in the family, and most of the village. I eventually found myself obliged to visit Catalonia for the first time to meet all my in-laws and their friends. Not that I knew what Catalonia was, assuming (as did almost everyone else in the world at the time) that it was a Spanish province, complete with the usual Spanish paraphernalia: flamenco, bullfights, sangria, and one language only: español. I was astonished to discover that all the people around me in this village just sixty kilometres outside Barcelona, couldn’t dance flamenco, loathed bullfighting, eschewed sangria, and instead of Spanish, were speaking a language I’d never heard or heard of before.

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We’ve all heard of the saying, “Risk versus Reward,” and for those in any business, that’s a guiding principle. Having always had limited means, I take fewer risks than most in marketing, since, by definition, risks don’t offer guarantees. I’ve had to overcome that to a degree, however, as most everything involved in promoting a book calls for risk, even of one’s time.

A few years ago, I participated in an author’s panel at an event. One of the topics that came up was the profit the majority of authors make. With less experience than the other three, I sat back and listened with eagerness, wondering if my lackluster earnings were a reflection of my work. To my relief, they responded with laughs and jokes, making it clear that my meager royalty checks were not the exception.

The general public mainly hears about the big-name authors who make millions per bestseller. Like with all industries, though, the top of that pyramid is very narrow. Underneath lie a plethora of contemporaries who will never see that kind of net worth. Granted, those results sometimes are a reflection of poor workmanship, but in many cases, it’s just surrounding circumstances. A small-town clothing shop won’t earn the same profit as a designer brand, simply because they won’t have the traffic and exposure. Still, they often have superior products.

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Ask a hundred authors what they find the most challenging, or the least fulfilling, about being an author and the majority will tell you it’s marketing and promotion. Authors crave readers, but we don’t enjoy self-promoting, placing ads or choosing a Twitter promotion. These same authors will admit that the most rewarding time is when they get to engage readers directly.

Let’s face it: readers are difficult and expensive to find. Most marketing campaigns deal with online systems, a newsletter service, a blog tour, an ad placement, a book club email, or a book give-away. While popular authors can afford a PR service to set up a book tour or a dedicated booth at a major book festival, most authors, including me, find these venues too expensive or impossible to get.

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I have been toying with the idea of writing a book about world religions since high school, but I could never figure out the right way to pull it off. The problem? With thousands of religions practiced around the world, it seemed like trying to capture the rich tapestry of religious beliefs would yield an unreadable tome. But then I had my beautiful daughter, and just a few days after bringing new life into this world, it hit me: I could write a book exploring the spectrum of answers religions provide for life’s biggest questions.

As I cuddled my baby and kissed her chubby cheeks, I realized that writing a book while juggling a newborn, an extremely active toddler, and a job would be challenging, to say the least. I was terrified that I would give up, so I came up with four rules to keep me focused and motivated…

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Everyone stutters occasionally, but only a few of us are stutterers. And those of us who are stutterers don’t always stutter, just as the rest of you don’t always speak perfectly. We all stammer confessing love, but never do if crying out in pain. The well-meaning compliment, “But you’re not stuttering now,” is as hurtful as it is unknowing. A stutterer is always a stutterer, even when silent.

There are Egyptian hieroglyphs they say refer to us, and a Babylonian cuneiform that records a stammer amid inventories of grain. There’s the Bible’s Moses, slow of tongue. Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It recites: “I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’st pour his concealed man out of thy mouth as wine comes out of a narrow-mouthed bottle—either too much at once, or none at all.” Too much or none at all—that pretty much sums up literature’s purposes for us. Stutterers are present from Zola to Joyce to Rushdie, from the highest culture to the lowest. Septimus Warren Smith stammers in Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and Stuttering Bill in Stephen King’s It, like his author, remains a loser until he makes it big as a horror novelist. Children are still treated to the refrain “Th-th that’s all, folks!” in recycled Porky the Pig cartoons on Saturday morning television, whose song “K-K-K-Katy” is what Harvard professor Marc Shell calls “the most deeply humiliating parody of stuttering ever made in the English language.”

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“You’re a turd stuck in a butt crack!”

Having this epithet hurled your way might anger you, stun you, might make you retort with an equally graphic insult. On the other hand, it also might make you laugh.

Context is everything. There are many love languages. This can be part of one. If your grandson isn’t yet four, and his fascination with life zips between gazing awestruck at dinosaur skeletons in museums and jabbering about poop and body parts, then this appellation might be a term of endearment.

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Okay. I have an idea. I want to convey it to others. The dragon swoops down out of the heavenly abyss and tries to bite my head off. Its nostrils and mouth are flaming and its tail is lashing violently, threatening to shred me to ribbons. I take hold of its horns and pull, twisting and turning, until I sit atop the creature, trying desperately to tame its thrashing so that I can ultimately harness the animal to my will and direction.

Language is a dragon you have to wrestle with. With words, I create a bridge of meaning between my own experience and someone else's understanding of that same experience. Knowledge bases are different, and each person has by default, an arsenal of experience and references to draw from to attribute meaning to language. Often, we get it wrong, creating gaps in our word usage so that the true meaning of what we want to convey isn't transferred over from writer to reader. We get it wrong and create only misunderstanding and a gulf between individual and collective belief.

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When we pulled open the door of an Italian restaurant a bellhop in Chicago recommended, I glanced at its name etched into the massive glass pane next to the door. Under the words was an illustration of a circle that seemed faded or splotchy on the bottom half. Curious, it was. Curious was I. “Il Culaccino” with a small “il” and larger letters for the following noun was the eatery’s name. I know no Italian, so it’s not something I’d readily be capable of deciphering. I figured “il’ meant “the.” Yet, because I speak French, I know “Cul” means “bottom,” like in ‘cul de sac’ and “cul’ connotes something circular. Nonetheless, I had no clue.

When the owner sat us, I asked the translation of “culaccino”

“The mark left on a table by a wine glass,” he said.

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It is the question I am asked most often—“How does one become the authorized biographer of a literary legend?”

In this case, the author is Ray Bradbury. I worked with him over twelve years on four books and a graphic novel. Bradbury, of course, is the author of such timeless works of the fantastic as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Dandelion Wine, to name a few.

Certainly, every biographer of a living writer or artist has their own decidedly singular path to their subject. In my case, my biography, The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (HarperPerennial, 2006) grew out a profile I wrote about the author on the occasion of his 80th birthday for the Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine. But truth be told, there is a more chimerical backstory that begins long before this. The story behind my becoming Ray Bradbury’s biographer was, well, rather Bradburian.

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It’s not even about the absence of the Internet service, solitude, or lack of distractions. Neither simply about the time, I can measure in sunsets instead of hours.

My old van is small but it can fit lots of stories.

She holds only the bare necessities. I include books in that category. I carry three boxes of books in the storage compartment underneath the foldable bed. I laugh that my fearless Dragonfly makes the biggest library that has ever roamed these dirt roads.

Inside, I scale down, but right outside my doors stretches the endless open space. Cooking one-pot meals on a single hob, in a cubicle which is my kitchen, living room, bathroom, and bedroom at once, I am learning to cut down on what’s not essential. Including in my writing. I keep crossing off objects from my list of things to bring on a trip, and metaphors from my new poem.

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As a writing coach, I often hear my clients utter specific reasons why they cannot write. These particular reasons, focused around six words, keep writers stuck behind emotional blocks. But we can work through those blocks and find new ways to craft our words. By moving toward our writing goals, avoiding these six words.

What If

The first two words, “What if” are statements based on fear.

“What if I get a contract and I can’t meet the deadlines?”

“What if I work on this article or book and I get rejected?”

“What if I have only one book in me? Is it worth it?”

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I was in a writing class once in which the teacher decided to do a sentence-by-sentence critique of the first of page a student’s story. The teacher had gone so far as to get an overhead projector so she could display the page and her many, many edits of it in a billboard-sized font for all the class to see. The gist of this exercise, as far as I could tell, was that the story wasn’t working at all, but that with some serious line editing it could be resuscitated and given narrative life.

It was brutal. Not one sentence escaped her pen. Every edit came with an explanation for why this word was wrong or that phrase was unnecessary. I didn’t think the teacher was being unkind, but she did seem to be making a bit of an example of the student’s story: This is how not to write. The lesson, after all, was really not about the student’s story; it was about her sentences, her awkward, graceless, inexact sentences.

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When my writing goes out into the world, I want my name emblazoned on it for all to see. Except for the two times I didn’t.

Real name, pen name, which byline option is right for you? Authors might opt for a pseudonym if they:

• Prefer a barrier between their publishing and private lives.

• Want to shield someone else from the fallout of their writing.

• Need to cordon off their writing from their other professional endeavors.

• Write in a genre typically associated with a gender that is not their own.

• Have established certain expectations in their readers but want to try Something Completely Different.

• Have a name they believe is too difficult to spell or pronounce, or that is identical or confusingly similar to someone who is already famous or infamous.

• Don’t like the name given to them at birth or acquired by marriage.

Examples of literary name changes are as varied as their reasons.

I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I’ve been asked if writing was therapy. I have a therapist for that, and I wouldn’t use my friends, family, or the Internet for that purpose. But writing does help me make sense of the world. The act of getting thoughts out of our heads creates both a closeness and a distance that allows us space to heal.

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On the day the dental specialist told me I had cancer, I started a blog. It was the only response that made any sense to me – to put down words, to document it all. It was the easiest way to keep everyone updated, but more importantly, it felt like the only way I could take control of my own narrative. It was my opportunity to show people how to approach my illness: with honesty, compassion, and humour.

I don’t have enough fingers to count the times I’ve been asked if writing was therapy. I have a therapist for that, and I wouldn’t use my friends, family, or the Internet for that purpose. But writing does help me make sense of the world. The act of getting thoughts out of our heads creates both a closeness and a distance that allows us space to heal.

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I was in Eugene to give a talk several years ago when I came as close as I have ever come to experiencing stage fright. I was still new to the kind of hour-long talks authors are invited to give. As a young man, I had done a fair amount of theater, so I was comfortable enough on the stage – but it is one thing to memorize your lines and blocking, and another thing to more or less wing it alone at a podium. I never script my talks; in fact I barely follow an outline. I knew from the first time I gave a talk that the more improvisational I could be, the better.

However, on this night, as I waited off stage and listened to my introduction, an insidious thought crept into my head. “What if you have nothing to say? What if you get up there, in front of all those people, and simply have nothing to say?” I began picturing myself mute at the microphone, struck dumb by a form of public writer’s block. My heart began to pound. There is a reason comedians say they “died” when they have a bad night. To stand in that spotlight, my silence a testament to my fraudulence, was as unimaginably intolerable to me as death. I had to do something. I had to save my life. And so I said to myself, “Think of something. Think of something to say right now!”

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