A grandson of mine is in kindergarten. The assignment in class was to draw a picture of your secret superpower. Kids drew pictures of themselves kicking soccer balls, playing musical instruments, or dancing. My grandson drew a picture of a red-headed boy in the middle of a line of kids where he held the hand of one on each side of him who held the hand of the next and so on. When my son asked his boy Harrison what his picture meant, my redheaded grandson replied, “Dad, my superpower is I make friends with everyone.”

I said to my own kid, “True. Anywhere we go, Harrison will try to make friends.” My son nodded in agreement. And I added, “You know what’s great? That kid of yours already knows himself.”

I began thinking about when I discovered who I was. It certainly wasn’t in kindergarten. Not sure if it was even in college, working, or having my own children. Much later. Maybe about 15 years ago? Fifteen years ago, I began writing.

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Getting started can be a major problem for budding authors. A great story seethes within us, but we need something to push us into action. For me, it was my political science students at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, who planted the seed in my mind that I should write a novel.

Late in my career, I introduced a course on Politics and Fiction that resonated with my students. Every now and then, someone would announce how much he or she liked the way the fiction got them to feel what it had been like for the people in the story to live through the confrontations of their day. One young woman became enthused with a novel about the late 1940s and revealed her wish to have lived in those days. 

As I slowly realized the powerful impact historical fiction could have on readers, discontent began to fester in my mind. I was the author of two successful political science textbooks. But no student ever told me that my textbook had touched them viscerally the way that a novel could. 

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Often my true stories are accepted because I made the editor laugh. Several editors tell me how funny I am. I wrote an essay recently that was published in a women’s regional magazine. When I reread it, I realized I’d employed a lot of the rules for creating humor, but I’d used them subconsciously. I inherently know them. So, I’ll reprint this piece, which appeared in Sasee of Myrtle Beach and then diagram it, so-to-speak, to show why it’s funny. Many folks don’t think they can compose funny stuff because they’re not funny naturally. I’m not sure if you have to be funny to write funny. I’m from New Jersey originally. You must be funny if born there. So, writing comical schticks isn’t hard for meet but certain gimmicks can be learned. Applying them creates humor in a piece, which always makes an author more winsome. Applying make-up will enhance what’s there. (Have you ever seen Hollywood actresses without their make-up? Yeah, Boy!) Sometimes, knowing more about why we laugh can help a writer become more palatable and more likeable, whatever their message is.

First, here’s my recent story about fashion: Sometimes I Talk to Myself: 

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“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.” — John F. Kennedy

Fear of failure – and its flip side, fear of success, are great drivers of procrastination for writers.

However…  

The only way to succeed is to constantly seek failure. Sit with that for a moment.

The. Only. Way. To. Succeed. Is. To. Constantly. Seek. Failure.

This sounds so counterintuitive, but it is an honest, real truth, even if it is one that is not easy to digest. Why? Failure is bad, right?Well, it certainly doesn’t feel good in the moment. It can be downright painful.

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While I have never birthed a human baby, I often benefit from the practices taught in birthing classes: breathe, push. I spend much of my time pushing to be read, published, known, welcomed. I breathe between pushes, sometimes because I'm about to pass out.

Among the things that have carried me through my pushes to write, publish, support other writers, and teach has been the support of having an action buddy (aka action partner). We're both goal-oriented people, full of visions with the chops to carry them out. It happens with greater ease by having a consistent partner who serves as a reminder of our progress.

Her first attempt was not the finest of writing, being all dialogue and no plot. But it did get her juices flowing. After reading a pile of romances and joining a critique group, she tried again. She thought her story turned out pretty good, but after receiving three rejections she buried it in a file drawer. A few weeks later, she received a call from a friend suggesting another publisher. Soon she had a contract, and not long after that, a box of her new books landed on her doorstep. Yippee! Barnes & Noble gave her a book signing complete with chocolates and sparkling cider.

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Most freelance writers know that assignments and money can ebb and flow. After being a freelance writer for more than 30 years, I've learned a few tricks to keep the money flowing my way. Am I wealthy? Nope. But I was able to stay home, raise my kids, and pay the bills. One of the tricks I learned was to make best friends – of sorts – with the editors, especially long-time editors of the publications for which I wrote. I discovered the "best friend" thing by accident. Our friendships, however, didn't blossom overnight. As with many relationships, it took time and effort to build it up - but the effort to help increase your writing sales. 

Editors deal with lots of people every day and don't always remember each writer by name or by story. The first thing you need to do is send articles and stories to different publications. That might seem overly obvious, but I know I continually compile lists of publications I want to write for. Unfortunately, I'm so busy compiling lists and checking guidelines that I sometimes don't sit down and actually write something to send. Editors can’t get to know me if I don't send anything. 

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Whenever I panic about how ChatGPT will affect my opportunities as a writer, I calm down by remembering that I’m a mediocre chess player.

I’ve loved chess since my dad taught me to play in elementary school. I’ve played 1610 games on chess.com. I watch YouTube videos and read books on strategy and openings. I purchased chess lessons from the silent auction at my Unitarian church. After all of this effort and experience, I have become… a perfectly competent chess player. Currently, 249,915 people on chess.com have higher rankings than my 1289 rating, and I could never beat many of these prodigies, wannabe grandmasters, actual grandmasters, club champions, and Kenyan high schoolers. I certainly can’t beat the best chess AI. Neither can the greatest human competitors. Deep Blue famously defeated then chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, and AI has since evolved to the point where chess engines like Stockfish and AlphaZero always triumph over top-rated humans. 

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She awoke one morning with the surprising thought that she could write a romance. She was fifty and had been an art teacher, a weaver, and an interior designer. She'd written a few nonfiction pieces on the side, but never fiction, unless her little tale for junior high science class about a cross-species relationship between Sid Squid and Cathy Cuttlefish counted. She’d known a romance writer in her church choir, so perhaps that’s where the idea came from. She'd never before read that genre but was fascinated to discover that all the author's love interests closely resembled their handsome choir director.

Her first attempt was not the finest of writing, being all dialogue and no plot. But it did get her juices flowing. After reading a pile of romances and joining a critique group, she tried again. She thought her story turned out pretty good, but after receiving three rejections she buried it in a file drawer. A few weeks later, she received a call from a friend suggesting another publisher. Soon she had a contract, and not long after that, a box of her new books landed on her doorstep. Yippee! Barnes & Noble gave her a book signing complete with chocolates and sparkling cider.

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I have a great deal of respect for the essay now, although I remember when I thought my advanced degrees in English were impractical if not simply useless. A new car changed my mind.

In the mid-80s I found myself suddenly single and without a credit record of my own. It’s a lost and vulnerable feeling. Like so many women in the same situation, I struggled to establish a new public identity. The first step was credit. So, trusting ingenuously in the glut of advertising by banks and car dealers soliciting new car buyers, I shopped.

It didn’t take me long to realize that the easy-finance welcome mat wasn’t out for me. My first stop, the national credit union I’d done business with for years, firmly rejected my request for a car loan. Deflated, I reminded myself that I never liked that credit union anyway. So, with my spirits lifted again, I visited a friendly bank I’d dealt with previously. They considered my loan request. They considered it hopeless.

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Writing—this desire to communicate one’s insights to strangers—borders on a mental condition. Only by words do they know you.  A reader tries on your thoughts to test if they fit. The reader’s imagination hems the words, sometimes altering their meanings, to adjust the story to their world of perception.

Thousands of invisible Emily Dickinsons exist.  Like her, they nightly roll their poem-pearls up and tie them in scrolls with blue ribbons and tuck them away in an ancient bureau for happenstance to discover someday-metaphorically speaking. Or maybe in this Age of the Internet, these souls spill their secrets, unloading them prematurely on a “cyber chest” to millions instead of buffing those stones, making them parables with meaning. Anonymous scribes blog, using the web as a confessional dump but never publish to be paid. Or they tweet!

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When I became pregnant, I decided I wouldn’t worry about trying to write for the first three months after the baby was born. It’s not called the fourth trimester for nothing. It was a smart choice, but as most writers know the itch to create doesn’t listen to reason. Despite the constant and overwhelming demands on my time and mental faculties, I was longing to write well before the three months was up. But how?

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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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