Tag: authors

Writing Tips From the Masters

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[found on openculture.com]
“Here’s one way to become a better writer. Listen to the advice of writers who earn their daily bread with their pens. During the past week, lists of writing commandments by Henry Miller, Elmore Leonard (above) and William Safire have buzzed around Twitter. (Find our Twitter stream here.) So we decided to collect them and add tips from a few other veterans — namely, George Orwell, Margaret Atwood, and Neil Gaiman. Here we go:

Henry Miller (from Henry Miller on Writing)

1. Work on one thing at a time until finished.
2. Start no more new books, add no more new material to “Black Spring.”
3. Don’t be nervous. Work calmly, joyously, recklessly on whatever is in hand.
4. Work according to the program and not according to mood. Stop at the appointed time!
5. When you can’t create you can work.
6. Cement a little every day, rather than add new fertilizers.
7. Keep human! See people; go places, drink if you feel like it.
8. Don’t be a draught-horse! Work with pleasure only.
9. Discard the Program when you feel like it–but go back to it the next day. Concentrate. Narrow down. Exclude.
10. Forget the books you want to write. Think only of the book you are writing.
11. Write first and always. Painting, music, friends, cinema, all these come afterwards.

George Orwell (From Why I Write)

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Margaret Atwood (originally appeared in The Guardian)

1. Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can’t sharpen it on the plane, because you can’t take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.
2. If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.
3. Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.
4. If you’re using a computer, always safeguard new text with a ­memory stick.
5. Do back exercises. Pain is distracting.
6. Hold the reader’s attention. (This is likely to work better if you can hold your own.) But you don’t know who the reader is, so it’s like shooting fish with a slingshot in the dark. What ­fascinates A will bore the pants off B.
7. You most likely need a thesaurus, a rudimentary grammar book, and a grip on reality. This latter means: there’s no free lunch. Writing is work. It’s also gambling. You don’t get a pension plan. Other people can help you a bit, but ­essentially you’re on your own. ­Nobody is making you do this: you chose it, so don’t whine.
8. You can never read your own book with the innocent anticipation that comes with that first delicious page of a new book, because you wrote the thing. You’ve been backstage. You’ve seen how the rabbits were smuggled into the hat. Therefore ask a reading friend or two to look at it before you give it to anyone in the publishing business. This friend should not be someone with whom you have a ­romantic relationship, unless you want to break up.
9. Don’t sit down in the middle of the woods. If you’re lost in the plot or blocked, retrace your steps to where you went wrong. Then take the other road. And/or change the person. Change the tense. Change the opening page.
10. Prayer might work. Or reading ­something else. Or a constant visual­isation of the holy grail that is the finished, published version of your resplendent book.

Neil Gaiman (read his free short stories here)

1. Write.
2. Put one word after another. Find the right word, put it down.
3. Finish what you’re writing. Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4. Put it aside. Read it pretending you’ve never read it before. Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5. Remember: when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6. Fix it. Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing. Perfection is like chasing the horizon. Keep moving.
7. Laugh at your own jokes.
8. The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like. (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing. But it’s definitely true for writing.) So write your story as it needs to be written. Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules. Not ones that matter.

William Safire (the author of the New York Times Magazine column “On Language”)

1. Remember to never split an infinitive.
2. The passive voice should never be used.
3. Do not put statements in the negative form.
4. Verbs have to agree with their subjects.
5. Proofread carefully to see if you words out.
6. If you reread your work, you can find on rereading a great deal of repetition can be by rereading and editing.
7. A writer must not shift your point of view.
8. And don’t start a sentence with a conjunction. (Remember, too, a preposition is a terrible word to end a sentence with.)
9. Don’t overuse exclamation marks!!
10. Place pronouns as close as possible, especially in long sentences, as of 10 or more words, to their antecedents.
11. Writing carefully, dangling participles must be avoided.
12. If any word is improper at the end of a sentence, a linking verb is.
13. Take the bull by the hand and avoid mixing metaphors.
14. Avoid trendy locutions that sound flaky.
15. Everyone should be careful to use a singular pronoun with singular nouns in their writing.
16. Always pick on the correct idiom.
17. The adverb always follows the verb.
18. Last but not least, avoid cliches like the plague; seek viable alternatives.”

[found on http://www.openculture.com/2012/01/writing_rules.html]

Beginners’ Blunders

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[found on writing-world.com; Marg Gilks]

“Writing is easy; all you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until the drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler

“You’ve written a great story, sent it out again and again, but it keeps being rejected. Why? What are some of the writing blunders you may be committing that set red “amateur” flags waving for agents and publishers — and invariably earn your story a rejection slip?

They’re Only Empty Words

Blonde bombshell, guns blazing, go the extra mile, passed with flying colors, under cover of darkness. Cliches like these pepper our everyday speech, but in a story, they’re a red flag. When you think about it, what information does a cliche convey to a reader? What does it mean to pass with flying colors? Why would a sexy woman be called a bombshell? What’s attractive about a bombshell? When you use cliches in your writing instead of creating original descriptions that actually engage the reader’s senses and emotions, you’re writing words that the reader will find very easy to forget.

Like cliches, empty modifiers like adjectives and adverbs are the sign of weak writing, produced by a writer without the imagination or the skill needed to create evocative descriptions that add depth to the story. Used to excess, they clutter up a story with empty words that distract the reader as she tries to envision an image that the words just aren’t conjuring.

Used in place of more vivid language, adverbs and adjectives are just as commonplace as cliches. “Fluffy white clouds” — ho-hum. Why not clouds that hang in the sky like dollops of whipped cream, or that are as plump as popcorn? “They moved quickly down the street.” How fast is quickly? Are they running, or speeding along in a car? If you replace the weak verb “moved” with one that’s more specific, you wouldn’t have to use the adverb “quickly” at all: They dashed down the street, or flew down the street on their bicycles.

“Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader — not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon,” said E.L. Doctorow, author of Billy Bathgate. A memorable story is one that readers experience. Get specific. Paint word pictures for your readers instead of falling back on tired phrases and descriptors, and you’ll create a story that publishers will want to share with their readers.

Tell Me No More!

Many beginning writers, faced with the dilemma of conveying background information or character details to the reader, go the obvious route — they throw it all at the reader in a big, expository lump of facts often called an “info dump.” They tell the reader everything.

Readers pick up a story to be entertained, not to be lectured. Nobody likes to be told what to think; like you, readers want to form their own opinions. Whenever possible, show the reader what she needs to know about a character or a society or a setting — persuade her to form an opinion that matches your goals in writing the scene or creating the character. If you have to resort to telling, feed it to the reader in manageable bits, woven into the story here and there, so the reader doesn’t realize she’s learning anything.

“Okay,” you think, “the reader needs to know what my character looks like, so I’ll have him look in a mirror, and describe what he sees.” Or: “Well, if two of my characters tell each other what the reader needs to know, then that’s showing because it’s dialogue, not exposition.”

Don’t. Neither solution is effective showing, it’s telling with props — and such a common blunder among beginners that the techniques themselves are considered cliches: “Sarah looked in the mirror and saw a pretty red-haired girl with green eyes and a freckled nose staring back at her.” Do you look in the mirror and see that? Or do you notice you need a shave or a haircut, or grin to examine your teeth? If you’re not noticing your physical description, your character wouldn’t naturally notice this, either.

“As you know,” you have one of your characters say, “we have been walking through this desert for the past five days, and it is quite hot. We have no water — we’ll have to find some soon, or we’ll die.” To which your other character responds, “Indeed. You know I’m the world’s foremost expert on skin cancer, and these sunburns can’t be doing us any good at all.” Are you laughing yet? I hope so! Nobody talks like this. So don’t make your characters say things they wouldn’t say naturally, just for the sake of conveying information.

Inept showing like this is just as bad as an info dump, and will earn you a rejection just as quickly. As with avoiding empty words, put a little more effort into how you convey information to the reader, so it becomes an experience, not an effort to read.

Head-hopping

You’ll probably notice when reading a contemporary novel that the story seems to be told in the voice of only one character. If there seems to be more than one character telling the story — different viewpoints — if you pay close attention to each scene within that novel, you’ll probably find that only one character seems to be sharing his or her perceptions of events in the scene with the reader. The character whose eyes readers see story events through, whose thoughts the reader “hears” in a scene or throughout a story or novel is called the point of view character. This is called “limited” point of view, and it’s the most common form you’ll see, because today’s readers like getting right inside a character’s head to experience the story.

The point of view (POV) that most novice writers fall into, however, is “omniscient” point of view. In this point of view, the narrator is all-knowing and all-seeing, popping from one character’s head into another, making the reader privy to everyone’s thoughts and everything that’s going on, even if that activity is off-stage, in the past or in the present or in the future. There is a lot of explaining — the omniscient narrator tells the reader what everyone is thinking and what is going on.

Sounds pretty good, huh. Look at that description of omniscient point of view again — the narrator is telling. Telling instead of showing is one of those red flags for rejection, remember? With omniscient, you are leaving nothing to the reader’s imagination. You’re not allowing the reader to participate, to experience, but merely to observe. For this reason, while omniscient POV is a legitimate point of view, it has fallen out of favor with today’s readers.

If point of view hops from one character to another within a scene in your novel or story, it will be perceived by an agent or publisher as poor writing. Manipulating point of view to best effect or maintaining it consistently takes attention and practice, but it’s one skill that sets more experienced authors apart from novices, and well worth learning.

Mechanics

Yes, this is the icky stuff — the grammar and punctuation and spelling that you’d rather not think about. But agents and publishers think about it — in fact, it’s the quickest way for them to tell if a manuscript is worth anything beyond a cursory look. If, in that first glance, they see too many mechanical errors, they’re not likely to give the story itself a chance.

Agent Noah Lukeman, author of The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile, cites misuse of the question mark — a common blunder — as reason enough for a rejection. “The same holds true for the exclamation point,” and, to a lesser degree, parentheses, he says. Think of it — a simple little question mark could doom your story.

Punctuation marks are the most obvious red flags. You also have to watch out for the sneakier grammatical pitfalls, like dangling or misplaced modifiers and passive voice. A misplaced modifier occurs when a word or phrase is placed next to a word that it can’t possibly describe: Growling furiously, jaws snapping, the hunter trussed the bear cub. It’s a good bet the writer intended the bear cub to growl and snap, but written this way, it’s the hunter! A dangling modifier happens when a word or phrase has been dropped: While eating lunch, the crocodile swam past the dock. If the croc wasn’t doing the eating, this sentence needs the lunchers to be complete — While we were eating lunch. Both of these grammatical blunders can create reader confusion at best or, at worst, unintentional humor at your expense.

What is passive voice? While active voice describes an action a character is doing, passive voice describes what is being done — it conveys no action: “she put the books on the shelf” as opposed to the passive “the books were put on the shelf.” The very structure of passive verbs suggests that an action took place in the past, not the present. Remember, today’s readers want to feel as if they’re right there in the story, experiencing events. Active voice is simpler, less wordy, and is more immediate.

Take the time to brush up on grammar and punctuation; take a moment to look up the correct spelling of a word you’re not sure of; go over your manuscript carefully when you’re done, correcting typos and any other small errors that may detract or distract. It’s worth the effort.

You’ve probably realized by now that writing a good story takes more effort than simply sitting down and dashing off the first words that come to mind. But more effort means a greater likelihood that the finished product will earn publication — not rejection slips.”

[found on http://www.writing-world.com/fiction/fiction10.shtml]

Twain’s Rules

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[found on mamohanraj.com]

“(from Mark Twain’s scathing essay on the Literary Offenses of James Fenimore Cooper)

1. A tale shall accomplish something and arrive somewhere.

2. The episodes of a tale shall be necessary parts of the tale, and shall help develop it.

3. The personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.

4. The personages in a tale, both dead and alive, shall exhibit a sufficient excuse for being there.

5. When the personages of a tale deal in conversation, the talk shall sound like human talk, and be talk such as human beings would be likely to talk in the given circumstances, and have a discoverable meaning, also a discoverable purpose, and a show of relevancy, and remain in the neighborhood of the subject in hand, and be interesting to the reader, and help out the tale, and stop when the people cannot think of anything more to say.

6. When the author describes the character of a personage in his tale, the conduct and conversation of that personage shall justify said description.

7. When a personage talks like an illustrated, gilt-edged, tree-calf, hand-tooled, seven-dollar Friendship’s Offering in the beginning of a paragraph, he shall not talk like a Negro minstrel at the end of it.

8. Crass stupidities shall not be played upon the reader by either the author or the people in the tale.

9. The personages of a tale shall confine themselves to possibilities and let miracles alone; or, if they venture a miracle, the author must so plausably set it forth as to make it look possible and reasonable.

10. The author shall make the reader feel a deep interest in the personages of his tale and their fate; and that he shall make the reader love the good people in the tale and hate the bad ones.

11. The characters in tale be so clearly defined that the reader can tell beforehand what each will do in a given emergency.

An author should

12. Say what he is proposing to say, not merely come near it.
13. Use the right word, not its second cousin.
14. Eschew surplusage.
15. Not omit necessary details.
16. Avoid slovenliness of form.
17. Use good grammar.
18. Employ a simple, straightforward style.”

[found on http://www.mamohanraj.com/Writing/twain.html]

You Need An Editor

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If you are a writer of any type…

You need an editor.

Write novels? Write blogs? Write devotionals?

You need an editor.

Write joke books? Write How To manuals?

You need an editor.

If you write…

You need an editor.

**

It’s time.

Get a quote for your project.
Move forward.

Click HERE to get started.

7 Habits of Highly Successful Authors

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[found on archetypewriting.com by Suzanne Harrison]

“The more I read how the successful authors do it, the more I realize that, like successful people in all walks of life, they all do things in common that contribute enormously to their success. So how can we learn from successful authors to ensure our own success in 2008 and beyond?

We can start by adopting what I call “The 7 Habits of Highly Successful Authors”. Adopt these 7 habits and you just may find that 2008 is the year you break through your own writing barriers!

1. Write about something you care about.

Whether you are writing fiction or non fiction, it is imperative you write about something you care about. The successful authors have some emotional connection to their content or story. If you are writing fiction, then write from a place of emotional familiarity. Your genuine experience will come through in your writing and your readers will connect with that. If you are writing a non fiction piece, choose a topic you are passionate or enthusiastic about. After all, if you are going to invest your precious time in what you are writing, you owe it to yourself to write with passion, feeling and enthusiasm.

2. Take risks

Don’t be afraid to put your head, or your hands, on the chopping block when you write. In the world of fiction, you will have no doubt heard about creating characters that are “larger than life”. That doesn’t mean they are giants, it means they go above and beyond and take risks and make decisions that we would not have the courage to take in our own lives. After all, it’s not about what we would do when we are tethered by the restrictions of polite behavior, it’s what we would do in our wildest imaginations that make our readers sit up and take notice.

For the non fiction writer, it’s time for you to take a stand. Take a view and stick with it, presenting your case with conviction and vigor. No one listens to someone who writes meekly, or with a wishy washy hand. Stick your neck out, and don’t be afraid to get it chopped off. All the greatest journalists are the ones who are not afraid to speak their minds. Get into that habit and you’re well on your way to being that next great journalist.

3. Plan

This is definitely the most ignored but equally the most important phase of the writing process. Planning is essential to the success of any undertaking and writing is no different. J.K. Rowling spent 5 years planning the entire Harry Potter series before she put pen to paper on a single word that appeared in the books. If you are writing a short story, novel or screenplay, planning the story before you begin writing is as essential to your success as ink in your pen or power to your laptop. There are some writers who claim to just start with an image or a sentence and then the whole thing just unfolds before them, but the writers who can do this with any degree of success are few and far between. Take the time to plan out your story, at the very least know where your beginning, middle and end are. The more planning you do, the more enjoyable the writing process and the less rewriting and editing you will have to do. The same goes for non fiction pieces, where it’s always advisable to have an outline in place before you write your article or book.

4. Write every day

Joyce Carol Oates said that she would write, even when her soul felt as thin as a playing card, because somehow the act of writing would set it aright. There are going to be times when you just “don’t feel like it”, but like any other job or activity that is important to you, you must still, somehow, sit down every day and write. It has been said that it is by sitting down every day to write that one becomes a writer. Stephen King writes every day, including Christmas Day. Whether you are working on a book, story, article or nothing, still sit down and write something every single day. Even if you only write one page every day, that’s 365 pages in a year and that’s a whole book, isn’t it? When you are a writer, you cannot not write, and writing is like breathing. You have an urge to put things down in print, so to keep that fresh and alive, you need to turn that tap on every day. It’s more than practice. It’s life.

5. Be prepared to work hard

I read somewhere once that John Grisham worked for 4 hours per day and made $20 million per year. Whether that is true or not (about the hours worked or the money he makes) doesn’t matter. It is far more common to hear tales today of the world’s most popular commercial authors working their proverbial butts off to keep up with deadlines, promotional commitments and the ins and outs of their everyday lives. Janet Evanovich gets up and writes every morning at 5am so she can get a full day’s writing in before she has to answer mail, emails and deal with her other affairs of business, Jodi Picoult has a wonderful stay-at-home husband who allows her the luxury of writing through school pick ups and travelling for long periods to do research for her novels. J.K. Rowling also said she (misguidedly) thought that life as an author would be a Jane Austen-type of affair, sitting in a room overlooking a field and writing in anonymity. Of course her life is a whirlwind of book launches, movie premieres, media commitments, school commitments, and of course she has a family with three children. And while we all no doubt wish we had her “problems” it is very obvious that in the early part of the 21st century, the life of an author, successful or not, is a hard-working life. We are either working hard to get noticed, working hard to stay noticed, or working hard to avoid being noticed. Any way you look at it, if you have an aversion to hard work, you need to look elsewhere. Successful authors work hard. Period.

6. Persistence

It is said that persistence outstrips all other virtues. I have a card propped up on my desk that says, “Success seems to be largely a matter of hanging on after others have let go”. Almost every successful author I have studied has said that their success is due, at least in some part, to pure persistence and determination. If your manuscript or article is rejected, rewrite it and submit it again. Or submit it to someone else. The first Harry Potter novel was rejected by every major publishing house before Bloomsbury picked it up for a song. Even so called “overnight successes” have a story behind them about how many times they were rejected, or how many novels or articles they’ve written that have no value other than as fire kindling. The authors that succeed are the ones who don’t stop until they do. It’s that simple. Never give up. Winners never quit, and quitters never win.

7. Let it go

And finally when you have written your article, book or screenplay and have submitted it for publication or approval, let it go. If you’ve done the best you can with it, let it go and trust that it will make its way to where it needs to be. And start something else straight away. Regardless of whether what you have submitted is accepted or rejected, you are a writer and a writer writes. Once you finish one manuscript start immediately on another. If the one you’ve sent is picked up, they’ll be happy that you’ve got something new already, and if not you’re well on your way to finishing your next manuscript.”

[found on http://www.archetypewriting.com/articles/writing/7habits.htm]

12 Questions for Writers

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[found on 12most.com by Kelly Belmonte]

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” ~ Stephen King, On Writing

I cannot disagree with King on this point. I have been reading a lot and writing a lot my entire life. But only recently have I gotten “serious” about being a writer. To be clear, what I mean by “serious” is really “published” — someone whose written words are read a lot by folks who are not otherwise obligated to do so.

A big shift for me occurred when I realized I could apply my years of accumulated project management experience to my writing. I found that if I treated each written thing (whether a poem, a blog post, a technical document, or any other piece of writing) just as I would a project for a client, I’d get more traction on meeting realistic publishing goals.

This post offers a list of 12 questions that, when answered, will provide a workable project management framework for the “serious” (!) writer.

1. Who is the ideal reader (“end user”) of my piece?

If I want my words to be published, the assumption is I want someone else to read them. Communication 101: speak the same language as your audience. Even if you are thinking, “I want to write things that I want to read,” you still want to identify the key elements of what makes you tick so you can know how to find more people like you to read your stuff.

2. Who is my client?

The client is the person, group, or organization that will compensate you for your efforts, whether through money, copies, publicity, recognition, validation, connections, or something else of value to you as a writer. This is also who is going to connect you with your ideal reader. Unless you’re self-published (in which case you have a direct compensation relationship with your reader), this is usually going to be a publisher with a specific agenda, format, or type of writing they promote. It’s important to know what’s important to them. If you have a fantastic collection of sonnets, you probably don’t want to submit your chapbook to a publisher of haiku, right?

3. Who is on my team?

Writing is never just writing. There’s research. There’s first and second drafts. There’s proofreading, copy editing, content editing, and fact checking. There’s formatting, graphic design, and packaging. There’s marketing and distribution. Are you good at all of these things and (here’s the clincher) do you have the time to do them all? Do you seriously think you can edit your own words? (Guess what I think about that…) Figure out who can help you, whether for pay, barter, or goodwill. It will be worth it in the end.

4. What is the purpose of the piece?

Do you want to inspire, connect, challenge, relate, instruct, change behavior, anger, illustrate, or simply tell a darn good story? Or some combination? This is both your roadmap and your test in writing. Your purpose keeps you on track.

5. What is the scope?

This is where you describe what you think is being asked of you by your client and what you want to create for your ideal reader. Get a handle on whether you’re writing the entire history of the Great American Experiment or a day in the life of a 21st century Bostonian. Articulate for yourself (and confirm with your client, if possible) the number of words, lines, chapters, pages, required thematic and stylistic elements, and formatting constraints. Only then can you begin to map out a plan for completing your writing project.

6. What is your end state for this piece?

“As a result of my words being read, _________________ [fill in the blank].” This may be easily confused with number 4, the purpose. They are connected — one should lead to the other — but not the same. For example, if my purpose in a piece is to provide instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, the desired end state will be “As a result… the reader will be able to make a pb&j sandwich.” If my purpose is to inspire, my end state may be, “… the reader has an ‘Ah ha’ moment.”

7. How much time will it take?

Your scope (and to some degree, your team) will provide you with a good guideline for the amount of time required (the “level of effort”) for each element. While there are some standard estimates for pages per hour, different types of writing require different levels of effort. Get to know your own pace, tracking the amount of time you spend on each project, so that estimating your time gets easier as you go along.

8. When does it need to be finished?

Even if there is no deadline or entry date, make up due dates for yourself. It will give you some basic math to work out the answer to the next question. (Due date – today’s date = number of days left to work on project.) Don’t forget to take into account time for review and editing.

9. When will I work on it?

Many writers like me have day jobs, families, friends, other interests, and need to work our writing in around an already full schedule. If I am going to be “serious” about my writing, I have to answer this in a real and manageable way. I have to recognize my priorities, logistical challenges, and areas I’m willing to sacrifice for the words. This, too, is clarifying.

10. When will I know it’s done?

This isn’t as easy to answer as it may appear on first glance, especially given the independent nature of many writing projects and the varying schedules of publishers. But this is the million-dollar “ship it” question. It can be crazy-making — there’s always just one more tweak, another review, an alternative viewpoint, a bit more white space perhaps. Will that tweak make the difference between rejection and acceptance, between runner-up and winner? You may never know. But one thing you can know for sure: if you never submit your work, you will never be published. Decide what “good enough” looks like for you.

11. How did it go?

Conduct an “after action review,” looking at your original purpose, scope, end state, and deadline. If possible (and if appropriate), engage a reader and the client in evaluating if your piece (and the process for completing it) met expectations. Listen, and learn from the gap between what you said you would do and what you actually did. This is a great opportunity to get better or to pat yourself on the back for hitting it out of the park. It’s also a constructive way to handle the inevitable disappointments that will come with writing, whether it’s negative feedback from your ideal readers, a missed deadline, or a rejection slip. Use those disappointments as fuel for the next project rather than a reason to give up.

12. Would I do it again?

Ah, there’s the rub. Would you go back to that well, that publisher, client, magazine, meta-blog site again for another opportunity to be published? It’s certainly ideal when you’ve found your niche, the exact right space where your words connect with ideal reader and are supported by an influential client-champion. But usually there’s some middle ground between lousy experience and ideal. Know your limits and your ideals. Find the opportunity in that middle ground where the good outweighs the bad.

And here’s my bonus question: Do you take yourself seriously as a writer? If the answer is yes, how many of these questions do you regularly ask yourself, and are there others that keep you moving forward on your own publishing goals?”

[found on http://12most.com/2013/05/27/12-getserious-questions-for-writers]