I’ve been to a lot of writer’s conferences, and though some were small and some were large, and some focused genre fiction and others on literary fiction, they all had one thing in common. I noticed this similarity at the very first conference I attended, though I couldn’t name it. I was too distracted, you see. I was going to be pitching a novel to an agent for the first time, and though I had practiced my pitch a dozen times with my wife, I found the whole concept of pitching nauseating. The relationship between that agent and me in the ten minutes we’d spend together seemed unnatural. The agent simply had too much power. I worried that with one word she could slay my dream of writing.

And then I actually met her, and she was just a person, not an executioner, and I sat down and started talking about the book and there was nothing unnatural about our conversation. 

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Everyone’s full of… advice. I’m no exception. I used to aspire to be Ann Landers when I was a little girl, even though I swore she composed many of those astounding letters herself. Now as an old grown-up, I believe every letter was genuine. Folks do have weird problems. And folks seek advice even from strangers or from newspaper columnists that may or may not be the person in the boxed photo.

Advice comes and goes. The best advice today is out of vogue tomorrow. Nonetheless, there are certain cliched opinions that are evergreen. One— my dad used to say decades ago— I still go by. The other one is a quotation by a famous French literary elite from another century.

First, here’s my dad’s advice, which is humdrum and repeated by many, especially older generations: Never talk politics or religion at the dinner table and especially not at Thanksgiving when you are with extended family you see once a year. This taboo everyone knows, and yet fewer and fewer folks abide by. Like everyone else, I have my opinions, but because I know my brother has a diametrically opposed take-on-the-world, I am loathe to broach any topic that might offend him or worse cause him to plunge into a rant. His harangues launch into esoteric binges. If one makes the smallest, most incidental of statements, you are off to the races and beaten into submission by a barrage of opinions!

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Writing has always come naturally to me. Growing up, I used to fill notebooks with short stories and scripts for school plays. Writing was fun, satisfying, and most importantly, easy. Art class, on the other hand, was definitely not my forte. Take, for example, the time I had to sculpt a head out of papier-mâché. My classmates all achieved varying levels of success, but I could not for the life of me create anything vaguely resembling a head. Eventually I gave up, made a spiky ball, colored it bright pink and purple, and told the teacher it was an alien hedgehog. When it came to drawing, my greatest artistic achievement was drawing a stick figure – and not a very good one at that. 

Given my complete lack of artistic skills, hiring a professional to handle the artwork for my first book was a no-brainer. I did my research, found an insanely talented artist, and worked with him to craft the perfect spot illustrations. I had originally planned to do the same for the book cover, but after giving it some thought, I realized that I knew exactly how I wanted my cover to look. This led me to wonder if technology could help me overcome my artistic shortcomings and allow me to design the cover of my dreams. Perhaps there was an artist within me after all.    

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So you want to write a short story. At first glance, it doesn’t seem that hard. It’s all about expressing the perfect mixture of description and setting, plot, and character just like a novel, albeit in a smaller form. 

But say long form doesn’t interest you. You want to write a short story with a basic but gripping ascent to the climax before the action falls, everything resolves, and everyone lives happily ever after (or not). What is a structure you could follow? What are the terms you need to know to create a proper plot? 

I submit Freytag’s Pyramid, the most common variation of the short story and longer forms of creative work. If you know anything about short stories, you might have seen graphs or pictures making a rudimentary pyramid, with the climax being the very top point and the rising and falling of the action making up its sides. This is Freytag’s Pyramid, even if you didn’t know it was called that. 

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A novel is long. It takes an average of 10 hours to finish reading a novel, so it would make sense that it would take over 10 hours to write a novel, but I wrote a novel in 10 minutes. 

This isn’t a crazy scheme—or a lie. During the pandemic, I was working up to five writing jobs at a time. I wanted to spend time with my wife, with my baby, walk my dog, and see the light of day, even if only in my front yard. By the end of the day, after putting my daughter to bed, I barely had enough energy to eat dinner, let alone write a novel. 

Up until that point, I had been a marathon writer, working on the page for hours at a time. If I didn’t devote at least two hours to writing at a given time, I considered it time wasted, or not enough time to get anything done. If I only had an hour, I would spend most of the time organizing my thoughts, or my workspace, researching random facts that I didn’t actually need, or trying to figure out the right song for the mood I wanted in the scene. Then I’d spend about five minutes staring at the blank page until the hour was up and I could return to ignoring my novel all over again. 

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It’s 1977, and we’re in the South Island of New Zealand. I'm a noob — new academic, new medical educator, new New Zealander. 

I've just spoken at the New Zealand Psychological Society meeting where colleagues enthusiastically endorsed my proposal to recruit more Maori into the psychology profession and more Maori members into our nearly all Pakeha (white folks) society.

What's more, it’s not only psychologists who like my ideas — the New Zealand Medical Journal has accepted a related article on the need for more Maori doctors. I’m all smiles.

Until I'm not.

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Having previously outlined my Thirteen Rules of Successful Critique for those critiquing a piece, it’s only fair to now turn the spotlight on the writer. It takes incredible bravery for an author to bring his or her baby to a group of people for the specific purpose of having it sliced and diced while watching and listening.

But for usable results, you need more than bravery: you need a process to follow. That doesn’t come by accident or from total faith in your critique group. As the author, you share responsibility to help keep your critique on track through what you do.

So here are my Thirteen Rules of Successful Critique for receiving critiques. Once again, these are outlined based on groups where the author reads his or her piece aloud to a group reading along to a printed copy but can often be applied to other critique structures as well.

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As the leader of two writers’ groups for over eleven years, I’ve led/attended over a hundred critique sessions. While many critique sessions go as intended, I’ve seen some go very, very wrong. More times than not, the miss stems from a single reason: readers going into critique to “fix” the author’s story.

I know that it seems antithetical – why critique a piece if you aren’t there to help the author? We are all there to help the author. But the way to help best isn’t to ‘fix’ the piece. ‘Fix’ comes with the attitude that we as author-readers know better than the author about his or her own story.

As those providing critique, our goal should be to help the author identify those areas that work, and those that don’t or confuse the reader. We need to assure that we are not replacing the author’s voice with our own. For people who have found their own writing voice, that can be more difficult than it seems.

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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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