It’s fine to start on the surface, but there is no relief to be found until you go deeper.

When a puzzle is easy, you solve it without thinking, without doubting, without staring at it and wondering if there even is an answer.

The writer in me was reminded again that nobody owed me their attention.

I have always been biased toward happiness, creativity, and enthusiasm.

The problem with pursuing something all the time is that you never really have it.

Fortunately, there is something in me that’s in everyone.

I could hear something inauthentic in his voice as he criticized me.

Life is so frustrating when what you want isn’t coming.

Nothing makes me grumpier and less interested in being on this planet than believing my focus doesn’t matter.

Boo Trundle is a writer, artist, and performer whose work has appeared across various platforms and publications, including The Brooklyn Rail, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and NPR’s The Moth. She has released three albums of original music with Big Deal Records. She lives in New Jersey. The Daughter Ship is her first novel.

Bonnie Jo Campbell is the author of The Waters, a novel, which was the Today Show’s January selection for their “Read with Jenna” Book Club. The Waters was also featured in Oprah Daily’s list of “Best Books of 2024.”

Estelle Erasmus is a professor of writing at New York University, the host of the Freelance Writing Direct podcast, and former “All About the Pitch” columnist for Writer’s Digest. She has written about a variety of subjects (health, beauty, fitness, publishing, business, travel) for numerous publications. Her articles for the New York Times and Washington Post have gone globally viral (with more than 500 comments on her NYT piece, “How to Bullyproof Your Child”).

Award-winning and bestselling author Tess Gerritsen has written thirty books that have been published in forty countries and sold more than 40 million copies. Many of her novels have been top 3 bestsellers in the U.S. and #1 bestsellers abroad. Critics around the world have praised her thrillers as “pulse-pounding fun” (Philadelphia Inquirer), “scary and brilliant” (Toronto Globe and Mail), and “polished, riveting prose” (Chicago Tribune), with Publisher Weekly naming her the “medical suspense queen.”

Writers, before submitting your fiction and nonfiction for feedback or publication, check your work for two common issues. 

Zombie Words Must Die

While wonderful phrases exist in most writers’ prose, an infestation of dead words may be lurking as WHIT (Was, Had, It, and That). 

Early drafts may include grammatically correct and acceptable WHITs in small doses, but most writing becomes burdened by dozens if not hundreds of vague words per chapter, essay, and entire manuscripts. The opportunity arises to amplify and develop tone, mood, plot, setting, and characters by replacing WHIT vague placeholders with concrete and visual verbs and nouns within active sentence structures. 

If my underwear ever had holes in it or the elastic was stretched out or the fabric stained, my mother would say, “What if you had some accident and wound up in the hospital? What would people think?” 

Who in any emergency room would care? 

But because of this conditioning or my natural proclivity (I remember dancing ballet on a low tiled coffee table within sight of our open front door as a kid, hoping someone would drive by, be awed, and whisk me off to join the New York City Ballet), or because projecting ourselves into others’ eyes is an ordinary human tendency, I landed in adulthood with my attention well-honed toward “what people think.” It’s haunted my writing, where worries about audience invade even my private journal. I’m as good as the next writer at leaping from rough draft to imagined New York Times review fame, or for that matter, obscure disdain. 

Dealing with my thoughts about what others think is an ongoing, daily artistic struggle.

I’ve sold my personal essays to anthologies, magazines, ezines, and newspapers over 450 times.  Some are inspirational.  Many are humorous.  Several are informative. Others are educational or travel oriented. I’ve even sold a few to religious magazines although I’m not overly religious. Once I sold a piece about penning Christmas letters to Australian Catholics; the Jesuit priests didn’t care I’m not Catholic nor have I stepped foot in Australia. They liked the advice I was giving. Markets are everywhere. Be persistent in submitting. Yet, first know what you are doing when you create your piece.

Below is a listicle on how to create a composition that will catch and keep an editor’s attention.

1. Crown your essay with a catchy title regardless of whether the editor might change it upon acceptance. Often, my stories in Chicken Soup for the Soul don’t keep the titles with which I christened them for  a myriad of reasons yet the title caught the assistant editor’s attention.  The very first piece I sold them over ten years ago, I entitled “Lessons from a Bitch.” It was about what my daughter learned about life from having a female golden retriever for eight years, until the dog passed.

2. Talk about one event or incident or one subject. Only one. This isn’t a ship’s log or a diary.

3. Self-deprecate. I’ve even called one piece of mine “I Do Dumb Things.”  This appeared recently in a new series called The Bad Day Books. Except for narcissists, everyone relates to doing dumb things.

Basically, there are three types of international authors. The trio includes:

     1.  Someone who writes a best-selling book the world wants to read.

     2.  Someone whose written work appears in a multinational publication (such as the former International Herald Tribune).

     3.  Someone whose writing turns up in publications based in different countries.

I am the third kind, and this is how I did it. You could, too.

I am an American who did not intend to become an international author of articles and short stories. Instead, I fell into the role. It started in 2014;  I was searching the internet for one of my on-line articles when I made a startling discovery:tthe piece had been reprinted that yearin a magazine I had never heard of in the Bahamas.

The journal’s editor did credit me as the author. However, she evidently thought my work needed a folksier style and more relevance to her subscribers, adding.  grammatical mistakes, reworded paragraphs, and inserted Haiti and the Caribbean into my discussion.  (If you see an article by me with a lot of grammar errors, it is not - or at least I hope it is not - my fault!)

A new year has started, and achieving your writing goals might seem like a daunting task, but there's a system that can help. I highly recommend using the SMART method, which has helped me sustain a full-time writing career. Whenever I'm goal planning, I stop to think if my plans fit within those guidelines.

That wasn’t always the case. I started my writing career thirteen years ago, and at first I had plenty of time to write. My only goal was to complete a book and move on to the next one. But as time passed, my responsibilities increased. I had to do marketing, administrative work, social media management, etc. etc. Juggling all those tasks meant less time for writing. 

Eventually, I realized that I needed to balance all those important responsibilities of being an authorpreneur with the most important one—the writing. If I didn’t have a book, I had nothing to sell, so I had to get better at getting words on paper if I wanted to continue my career as a full-time writer.

Directors make movies by shooting one scene at a time. Authors write books by writing one scene at a time. I teach a novel writing class at a homeschool co-op and the students get a little overwhelmed when I tell them we are aiming to finish a rough draft of 20,000-30,000 words. While some of them are pantsers and some are planners, I found that writing down the scenes is a happy medium for both writing styles. For the beginning novelist, or even the more experienced novelist looking for a new and more efficient method, scene-by-scene might be the way to go. This planning method helps writers know where the story is going to make quick work of the first full draft. Even if you don't enjoy planning everything out, you can still use the same technique to have at least a basic idea of where your story is headed. It's like planning a trip using a map (people really should still do this); you know where you're starting and you know where you want to end up. The middle is the fun part where you can stop at your plot points all along the way, but they don't all have to be planned. Surprise can be a good thing for both road trips and novel writing.

I was a monk in many ways, an ascetic living a simple life in upstate New York just outside of the Catskill Mountains. I studied martial arts, meditated, worked at a restaurant, and wrote a lot.

I didn’t want love or friendship. I wanted to be alone.

My mother had died a couple of years earlier. My family had been torn apart, and I was seeking respite from the complexities of life: a break from the demons calling me to join her.

I worked on my first manuscript, Dawn, about young love, cancer, and family dynamics. It had all the makings for commercial success. The story was universal.

It was an homage to my mother, who had lost her battle with cancer after a double mastectomy and brutal napalm for the body chemotherapy. My father was alone now. My childhood home outside NYC was under contract to be sold so we had to move, and the Florida home she picked out was also. We had no choice but to leave our home and neighborhood behind. The idea had been to get her out of the rat race and move closer to the beach, where she could rehabilitate. My father had quit his job at a prominent college to become her nurse. She was skin and bones and would often fall, struggling on her way to the bathroom.

I used to be the bravest writer I knew. 

Although this was true mostly because I didn’t know many other writers at seven years old, this brazen confidence did not stay with me long. As a kid, I fearlessly shared my poetry with anyone who wanted to listen to it, and many who didn’t. But as I grew, I began to feel guarded about my poetry, fearing the reactions, fearing the poems weren’t any good, didn’t say anything new, or revealed too much. I knew, though, that this was no way to write, that the writing that most profoundly impacted me was most likely the scariest for that author to share. I wanted to get back to a place where I had no barriers between what I wrote when I knew no one would be reading it and what I wrote for others to see. Unfortunately, that thought terrified me, so I began brainstorming solutions for overcoming this fear, and the answer I found was process, play, and, shockingly, some silliness.

In Around the Writer’s Block, Roseanne Bane describes the way that play can reduce stress, improve creativity, and help us “make new associations and connections,” which, given that poetry is all about associations, makes Bane’s suggestions especially helpful for my preferred genre. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, makes a similar argument to Bane, that taking ourselves less seriously and focusing on the “imagination-at-play” can enrich our writing, a prospect I’d find helpful in counteracting the painful and unutterable heaviness of the topics I sometimes touch on in my poetry.

The key to getting your writing noticed is to develop your voice. Like the voice of a great singer, a writer’s voice has its own character and energy. Think about it: you can always tell when Rhianna, Kelly Clarkson, or Barbra Streisand is singing just from listening to the first few notes.

The writing path can seem all call and no response. Must we be like Emily Dickinson writing our letters to the world that did not write back because the number of submissions precludes a personal or timely response? We speak into the void, and a generic rejection boomerangs back after a delay of eight, ten, twelve months—hardly fulfilling human communication. On social media, it's easy to spot writer laments. The gist of a recent S.O.S. post was “please, someone tell me one reason I should continue writing poetry.” After a robotically quick rejection, a novelist vented, “I F*ing Sent this Query 5 Minutes Ago What The F*.” On Facebook, another bewildered writer just received notification of an anthology acceptance five years after they'd submitted. 

 I certainly didn’t receive training in my two MFA programs on how to wait or hope for a warm human response. “How to not check your Submittable account twenty times a day” wasn’t in the curriculum. It’s something we endure privately during the boom-and-bust periods of our careers. What I've come to realize is that I don’t have writer’s block; I have reader’s block. To clarify, I don’t mean a failure to reach an audience. Readers’  blocks don't correlate with the number of published titles or level of acclaim. Just as writer’s blocks are caused by mindless mishandling of the present moment at the desk, reader’s blocks are glitches in our mindset after work is ready for publication.