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The Perfect Guide for Where to Submit Your Writing (Does Not Exist)

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Today’s post is by Dennis James Sweeney, author of the new book How to Submit.

As writers, we often long for the perfect guide to where we should submit our writing. We want a resource that is dependable, consistent, and navigable. The publishing landscape is complicated! Especially when we are first starting out, we need someone to distill that publishing landscape for us.

But it can be difficult to find a resource that will give you everything you need. Some resources provide a ranking system, organizing publication venues into an ordered list. Others use tags and categories to enable the use of search criteria. When submitting, the closest we can get to “perfect” is assembling a personal combination of these lists, depending on our own publication goals.

Available submission resources

Ranked lists are the most clearly organized submission resource, in that they tell us which venues are most advantageous to publish in if our goal is to achieve prestige for our writing. These kinds of lists are mostly used for literary magazines. They typically base their rankings on the number of awards given to pieces published in each journal:

Clifford Garstang reliably assembles a ranking of the literary magazines most often awarded Pushcart Prizes. He has separate lists for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.Erika Krouse divides the top 500 literary magazines for fiction into tiers based on prizes, circulation, payment to writers, and “coolness.” Her list also includes information about deadlines, response time, and word count.Most recently, Brecht de Poortere ranks literary magazines based on the relative weight of several prize anthologies. His extensive spreadsheet includes details like reading period, cost to submit, and whether or not it is a print magazine.

If you are submitting a full book without an agent, you will likely be looking for small, independent publishers. There isn’t a specific resource that ranks these presses. But browsing the winners and finalists for prizes like the CLMP Firecracker Awards, Lambda Literary Awards, and regional book awards (such as the Mass Book Awards) can give you an idea of the small presses that receive the most public attention. Additionally, book reviews give you an idea of which publishers’ books are being read and considered publicly. Review venues for small press writing include Full Stop, Rain Taxi, and The Rumpus.

If you’re in search of robust lists that don’t rely on a ranking system, there are also plenty of places to turn, not only for literary magazines but also for small presses and literary agents. These resources leave the work of “ranking” publication venues up to you, but they have the benefit of being highly organized based on a number of criteria:

Duotrope (which costs $5 per month) is the most longstanding, comprehensive database for both literary magazines and small presses. It includes a submission tracker, if you prefer to use an external resource instead of your own personal system.Chill Subs, which sprang up in 2022, is like a free, Gen Z Duotrope (although some features have recently been monetized).For the analog among us,  Writer’s Market  is the print edition of every detail about nearly every submission venue. Additionally, both Poets & Writers and the CLMP maintain extensive lists of literary magazines and small presses that are open for submissions.

If you have written a book you want to publish with a Big Five house, you will likely be searching for agents to query rather than looking directly for publishers. Jane Friedman’s post on finding a literary agent is a terrific primer on who needs an agent, how to query an agent, and how to choose the agent who is right for you. In addition, there are several lists and databases that will help you narrow down your search:

Publisher’s Marketplace ($25/month) is the gold standard. While it isn’t exactly a submission resource, it provides a detailed, updated account of all agented book deals in the United States. You can organize these deals by agent, genre, and keyword.Manuscript Wishlist has a searchable database of literary agents accepting submissions, sometimes including a personalized wish list that goes beyond the details included on Publisher’s Marketplace.QueryTracker includes notes from users on recent responses to their queries. Writer’s Market , Duotrope, and Poets & Writers include lists of literary agents alongside their information about literary magazines and independent publishers.

These submission resources play an important role in guiding writers toward the right home for our writing. Especially when you combine the insights of several lists, it’s possible to end up with a solid understanding of the landscape of literary magazines, small presses, and/or literary agents.

The limitations of submission resources

But still, here’s the thing: Not a single one of these resources is going to tell you exactly where you should submit your writing.

The ranked lists hint at which publications might mean look the “best” to some potential reader in the future. The unranked lists, for their part, give you the capacity to search for the criteria that match your writing.

But can they tell you who each literary magazine, publisher, and agent really is? Can they give you a sense of the character of each submission venue? Can they tell you whether this publishing experience will meet your goals?

That’s one thing these submission resources can’t do: They can’t tell you whether your writing is a fit. No matter how much information you have access to, a database can’t substitute for knowledge of the publication itself.

This problem reminds me of Borges’s very short story, “On Exactitude in Science,” which explores the difficult truth that only a map the size of the territory itself can be truly accurate. The same is true for submission resources. While these lists and databases help guide us toward venues that might resonate with us, it is difficult to fully understand where you are submitting until you go directly to the publications that are being described.

Navigating to their website and poking around is, of course, the first step in this process. But the best way to achieve familiarity with the venues where you are submitting, in my view, is to participate in the publishing landscape. The only “perfect” submission resource is simply getting involved.

Getting involved with literary publications doesn’t have to mean a major output of time. Instead, there are many small routes you can take to a greater familiarity with the venues where you want to send your work.

The perfect submission resource: getting involved

The easiest way to become familiar with the literary landscape where you’ll submit your writing is being a reader. Read online literary magazines, subscribe to print literary magazines, and read books from a diversity of presses. Set a goal, for example, of reading one new magazine or small press book each season. Look up the agents of books that you appreciate, and read more books they have worked on. Over time, you’ll build up a familiarity with the publication circumstances of the writing that speaks to you.

Attending events is another low-commitment way to get involved and meet others in the literary scene. Many reading series have now migrated to Zoom, so you can attend online or in your local area. Readings hosted by literary magazines or presses, especially, can give you a deep sense of their personality.

You can also get involved in a more active way by contributing your time to a publication or helping to build the conversation around others’ writing. There are several ways to do this:

Write book reviews. Even if you’re inexperienced, writers and publishers always appreciate a thoughtful consideration of their books, and literary magazines are often eager to publish reviews.Conduct interviews with published writers. Literary magazines often publish interviews with authors as well. Taking the initiative to conduct one allows you to get your foot in the door while being in touch with a writer whose work you appreciate.Volunteer as a reader for a literary magazine. Many literary magazines need initial readers of submissions to help them narrow down their queue.Start or help out with a reading series. Writers always need somewhere to present their writing when they come to town. Creating the space for live events puts you in touch with both writers and publishers of just-released books.Follow and engage on social media. As stressful as social media is, it can also be a source of connection and warmth, where you can build a personal relationship with publications’ and agents’ work in real time.Participate in writing groups, workshops, and classes. Getting together with other writers on a regular basis will help you build community and share knowledge, even if it’s not directly related with the publishing world.

Just remember: participating in the literary world isn’t a quid pro quo. It won’t feel great—to you or to anyone else—if you get involved so that you can get published. Instead, you’re investing in a community you want to be a part of. As I see it, the entire goal of submitting and publishing our writing is to get involved in a collective literary life. You might as well start now.

To me, the beauty of the publishing landscape is that there is no perfect submission resource. You simply can’t contain the diversity, idiosyncrasy, and varying publishing practices of all the places where we can submit our writing.

This leaves some level of the unmappable in our submission practice, no matter how familiar we become with the publishing world. But it also mirrors the entire experience of being a writer: we dive into the unknown with spirit, with hope, and emerge on the other side knowing a little better who we are.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out How to Submit by Dennis James Sweeney.

6 Tips on Writing Disabled Characters

Photo by Marcus Aurelius

Today’s post by James Irwin grew out of a course on disability representation in media and literature he teaches in the disability studies program at Wm. Paterson University.

Good writers create characters that reflect the diversity of our world. Unfortunately, disabled characters in the work of abled writers tends to fall short of the ideal. Most people with a disability rarely see themselves in stories, and when they do the representations can be inaccurate, with some offensively ableist. Too often, writers become lazy and rely on disability stereotypes and tropes, turning these characters into not much more than scenic décor and plot devices. As abled writers, how can we do a better job?

1. Include characters with disabilities in the first place.

The widely accepted definition of a disability is any condition of the body or mind that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities and interact with the world around them. That covers a lot of ground, from the mental to the physical, from the internal to the external, from the obvious to the hidden. So, it should come as no surprise that over a quarter of Americans reportedly live with a disability of some type.

Yet the disabled are 34 times more likely than the abled to report they’re not adequately represented. There currently is no data on disabled characters in adult literature, but we know what’s happening in mass media. In the top 100 films of 2022, only 1.9% of characters with speaking roles were shown as having a disability. Only 0.6% of speaking characters were disabled women, and 0.47% were disabled people of color. If you are a black woman with a disability, you are very nearly absent from feature films.

2. Don’t make disability the defining feature.

When you write a disabled character, they should not be defined by their condition. They should have their own lives, their own accomplishments, their own complex personalities. The condition doesn’t need to be a matter of concern or comment at all. For example, I’m currently finishing a novel in which a main character has undiagnosed autism. He isn’t aware of it, nor is anyone else, and no one comments that he might be autistic. His condition is just part of who he is. But I know about it, and that knowledge helps me create a character who is consistent in how he conducts himself, reacts to situations, and interacts with others, all of which are a little different than what a non-autistic character would do.

3. Avoid stereotypes and tropes.

It is distressing how the same old cliches are applied to disabled characters. Most fall into one of the “big four” of disability tropes: the “magical” disabled, the “evil” disabled, the “inspirational” disabled, and the “redemptive” disabled. Here’s how to identify these stereotypes.

Magical

Magical disabled characters transcend their limitations through nearly super-human abilities, typically to help the lead character. They are usually defined by their disability and their compensating skill, and they rarely have an arc because they are already as developed as they will ever be. Think of the math savant Raymond Babbitt in Rain Man, the quadriplegic criminalist Lincoln Rhyme in The Bone Collector, the Pinball Wizard in Tommy, or any of a horde of blind martial arts masters. Marvel superheroes are often examples, from Charles Xavier’s wheelchair to Echo’s deafness to Moon Knight’s dissociative identity disorder.

Evil

In evil disabled characters the disability causes the villainy (“I’ll get even with the people who did this to me!”) or serves as the physical manifestation of a twisted soul. Think of Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, Darth Vader in Star Wars, or, more subtly, Mr. Potter in It’s Wonderful Life. Look at Richard III: in real life he had one shoulder a little higher than the other but was otherwise a normal man; a hundred years after his death Shakespeare gave him a hunchback, a limp, and a withered arm to shape his wickedness. James Bond villains are a parade of the evil disabled, mostly facial disfigurement.

Inspirational

The inspirational disabled “go beyond” their disability and accomplish marvelous things through pluck and hard work and a good attitude, thus finding some acceptance by the abled community. This is based largely on the notion that a disability is not merely a difference, but a tragic challenge that needs to be overcome. A version is known as “inspiration porn,” a phrase coined by the late Australian activist Stella Young to describe feel-good stories about children running with artificial limbs or a boy with Down syndrome allowed to suit up for the last play of a high school basketball game. This is top-level cringe in the disability community.

Redemptive

The redemptive disabled exist mostly as a prop, sometimes sacrificing themselves in some manner to prove their worth or give meaning to their life, usually to help the lead character reach their goals. Think Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol or Quasimodo in Notre-Dame de Paris, or Auggie Pullman in the middle grade novel Wonder. A notorious example is the wealthy young quadriplegic Will Traynor in Me Before You; abled people may read it as a romance, while the disabled read it as confirmation that their life has no value (unless they’re rich enough to bequeath a lot of money to someone), so suicide is a reasonable conclusion.

4. Look to your own experiences.

Part of the trouble is that abled writers see the disabled as other, and therefore apply a distanced version of empathy. That is why so many stories ostensibly about a disabled character are actually about the impact those characters have on abled people around them.

But abled writers might be missing how much overlap exists. For example, I have an artificial knee, and for the few years before replacement I had difficulty doing certain activities and interacting with the world around me. In other words, during that time, according to accepted definitions, I absolutely was disabled. However, not once did I say that about myself, in large part because “disabled” is often viewed as a negative label. Nevertheless, I know what it is like to resent the lack of accessibility features in buildings and the condescension from strangers, particularly the passive/aggressive offers of help. Most of us have at some time in our lives experienced a form of impairment that we can use to mine deeper levels of understanding for our characters, even if we never officially thought of ourselves as disabled. Forget the label, tap the experience.

5. Learn from the disabled.

The most effective antidote to the harm caused by those stereotypes and tropes is to read what writers with disabilities have to say about their condition and experiences, because a lot of it may surprise you. Remember, there are many forms of disability and a writer with one can’t speak for all of them, so look for books and articles by writers with the conditions relevant to your characters.

For example, my writing of that autistic character owes much to the insights of the academic, inventor, and ethologist Temple Grandin, who documented in multiple books what she gained through her autism. She points out that focusing so intensely and automatically on the deficits causes people to lose sight of the benefits and strengths of the autistic mind.

A good source of perspective on physical disabilities is the DeafBlind speculative fiction writer Elsa Sjunneson. She is a fierce opponent of being marginalized by society, as she makes clear in her book Being Seen: One DeafBlind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism. She lives her life as a rebuke to those would push the disabled into hiding, through both her activities (she is an avid hiker and fencer), and her bold personality. (“People assume I’m going to be quiet and I am loud. I am snarky, I’m sarcastic. I talk a lot.”)

A view on “Invisible” disability can be found in Alyssa Graybeal’s Floppy: Tales of a Genetic Freak of Nature at the End of the World. She writes of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome as both a significant condition as well as essentially unnoticed by others. “It can be lonely and infuriating to be invalidated for ‘not looking sick,’” she says. “However, invisibility sometimes protects me from others’ insidious assumptions…or being treated as if my illness were the only noteworthy thing about me.”

Remember, there is no homogenous disability community. It comprises individuals, with a variety of conditions having a wide range of impacts on their lives. They have their own specific attitudes and relationships with their situations.

6. Apply the Fries Test.

Created by the memoirist and poet Kenny Fries in 2017, it was inspired by the Bechdel Test (which measures representation of women in fiction). It asks three questions of a manuscript:

Does the work have more than one disabled character?Do the disabled characters have their own narrative purpose other than the education and profit of a non-disabled character?Is the character’s disability not eradicated either by curing or killing?

A lot of work will “fail” the Fries test, but the most important thing about it is the process of applying it. By raising the issues in their minds, and assessing their work from that vantage point, abled writers can educate themselves and build greater understanding and empathy.

Writing characters with disabilities doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. Doing it better only requires being thoughtful, and putting in a little work to understand what things look like from the character’s position. “I hope people realize they don’t need a degree in disability studies,” says Elsa Sjunneson. “They don’t need to be disabled. They just need to be willing to listen.”

Data sources include the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, World Health Organization, Pew Research Center, Disability Studies Quarterly, Nielsen, USC Annenberg.

Free Yourself from Rewriting Paralysis

Photo by Anna Shvets

Today’s post, the fifth in a series, is by writer and creativity coach Anne Carley (@amcarley.bsky.social), author of FLOAT • Becoming Unstuck for Writers, now in its second edition.

Most of us accept the basic reality: We draft and then we rewrite. Edit, take a break (when time permits), revisit, and revise again. Sometimes, though, the revision process meanders off-course, leaving us—and our project—stranded.

Returning to our initial vision, applying reason, and using an outline are certainly useful tools. And yet. Sometimes they are not enough. A deadline focuses the mind, for sure. Walking away is a time-honored method for regaining a fresh view. And yet. For a host of reasons, many of us find ourselves needing to resolve an unfinished piece, and feeling uncomfortably stymied.

Zoom out

Becoming unstuck from this kind of paralysis can happen. One way to get out of the weeds is to pull the focus higher, to gain a broader view. Remembering the bigger picture can completely reset the way we look at the project, allowing us to resume work with fresh energy.

Accept some inevitable chaos

Another is to accept the erratic nature of the creative process, which is rarely linear or swift. Sometimes I don’t even know when a piece has started, let alone where its midpoint or end will turn out to be. A random hasty jot in a notebook can become something bigger, later. An old, discarded chunk in the file of a draft that went another direction can come to life by accident when I’m digging around in the compost files for something else.

Just do something

It can be smart to pick an arbitrary beginning point, just to start writing again somewhere, anywhere. Later, those words can be excised as throat-clearing that has outlived its usefulness, or moved elsewhere in the piece, or out to the compost heap.

Revision and optometry

I like the grace that George Saunders confers on the discomfort of rewriting: “An artist works outside the realm of strict logic. Simply knowing one’s intention and then executing it does not make good art.” He continues with a useful metaphor:

The artist…is like the optometrist, always asking: Is it better like this? Or like this?…As text is revised, it becomes more specific and embodied in the particular. It becomes more sane. It becomes less hyperbolic, sentimental, and misleading.

With each click of the imaginary phoropter (I learned a new word), Saunders is testing, word by word, line by line, trusting himself to recognize each incremental improvement, and repeating that process until the piece is good enough.

Challenge blind loyaltyBookshop • Amazon

For me, too much loyalty to my vision, pre-drafting, can interfere with the writing process. For example, this piece began as a post about scope creep. Once I started composing these sentences, though, it turned out to be about rewriting. A novel I’m working on began with one protagonist and her point of view. Then it changed to two of each. It’s now evolved to feature one protagonist whose experiences are interpreted by two additional POV characters.

The persistent rewriting process—sometimes with the added shake-up of getting out of the silo—makes those changes possible.

Just as Saunders suggests, it’s a process. You edit a sentence. Your inner optometrist clicks the dials. The lenses change, bit by bit, sentence by sentence, until things look—and feel—a little sharper, a little better. (I recommend his Saunders’ Office Hours Substack and Story Club, by subscription.)

Scene and Structure: The Wave Technique

Photo by Matt Paul Catalano on Unsplash

Today’s post is by regular contributor Susan DeFreitas, an award-winning author, editor, and book coach. On Wednesday, Feb. 12, she’s offering a free masterclass for fiction writers: Mastering the Art of Scene.

Often writers of fiction get no instruction whatsoever on how to construct a scene.

And personally, I think that’s ridiculous, because scenes are the places where we as readers most feel like we’re living the story. What would the Harry Potter books be without all that dialogue? What would The Hunger Games be like if Suzanne Collins had relied on summary rather than scene?

Boring, is what they’d be—even though they tell great stories.

But there’s more to it than just having your beloved imaginary people talk to each other on the page, in specific settings, with a little conflict thrown in for good measure.

In fact, there is one technique that will absolutely transform every scene you write, and make those scenes a lot more satisfying from the reader’s POV. Consistently using this technique will also have the effect of making your reader want to read on, because scenes like this feel surprising and dramatic.

That technique? Building toward a breaking point, then revealing something new about the characters, their world, or the plot.

Here’s how this wave structure breaks down.

1. The setup

What’s important for your reader to know in the scene to come?

I’m talking backstory, background info, world building, gossip about the other characters, whatever it is your reader needs to know in order to understand what’s about to go down in the scene to come. Whatever it is that would add richness, nuance, and depth to their understanding of the scene to come, find a way to work it into the narrative just before the POV character heads into the scene.

2. Scene begins

If you’re coming into scene from summary (“All week, Lizzie had been thinking about the callous way Erin had dumped Fritz”), make sure you transition clearly into scene (“And then, as she walked into the break room that day in search of her afternoon caffeine, there he was, frothing himself a cappuccino.”)

From there, make sure you establish the basics: What does this room look like? What’s the vibe? Who else is in the room? (Definitely don’t spring a new character on us halfway through the scene who was supposed to have just been lurking by the watercooler or something—unless that character is supposed to be concealing themselves on purpose.)

And what do the other characters/character involved in this scene look like?

Include dialogue or activity that makes it clear what the characters are doing here in this setting, thereby setting the scene.

3. The build

Without a lot of small talk or throat clearing, the main characters here should make it clear, based on what they’re saying and how they’re acting, what their agenda is in this situation.

If we go with the scenario suggested by my parentheticals above, maybe the POV character, Lizzie, really wants to let Fritz know that the way Erin dumped him was just terrible, and she’s sorry he’s had to go through all that (and maybe that Lizzie isn’t a big fan of Erin, BTW).

Here’s the point where many writers back down or back away. The Fritz character maybe acts a little furtive, and Lizzie doesn’t know why, so there’s a little tension there, but on the whole, things stay nice and surface level and polite.

Which is (you guessed it) boring!

These are cases where I encourage my clients (especially my conflict-averse clients) to push out the conflict—in this case, that might mean having Lizzie press the matter with Fritz, maybe even corner him by the espresso machine, even as it’s obvious to the reader that Fritz really doesn’t want to be having this conversation.

That’s a key part of this technique: Pushing the conflict to the point where something actually changes.

4. The break and the reveal

Finally, poor Fritz can’t take it anymore: He stops trying to get away from Lizzie, and, exasperated, he confesses that Erin didn’t dump him, he dumped HER.

Scenes that reach this point will strike your reader as powerful and well-crafted. But if it works for your particular scene and your particular story, you can take it one step further for even more dramatic effect (and even more narrative momentum).

5. The double reveal

Fritz reveals that he has, in fact, always had a thing for Lizzie. (And then, you know, maybe Erin comes in to find them snogging by the nondairy creamers.)

Many storytelling authorities (screenwriter Robert McKee among them) will tell you that the measure of whether a scene works or not is whether something has changed by the end of it.

What I’ve outlined above is not only a great way to achieve this, but to achieve that sense of change in a convincing way (by pushing out the conflict first).

By giving us the background info (the setup) before the scene, you give us a sense for what is either common knowledge in the world of the story or known to the POV character about the situation they’re headed into—and you remind us how they feel about it.

By establishing the setting of the scene and its characters in a clear way at the outset, you give us everything we need to fully visualize the scene, and to feel like we’re there ourselves with the characters as these various sources of conflict and tension bubble up.

By giving us the build (and staying with it long enough to create a sense that the conflict or tension has reached the point where “something has got to give”), you create a sense that the breaking point to come is not only fully convincing, but inevitable.

And by working in your reveal (or double reveal) at the breaking point, you deliver important story information in the most vivid and memorable way: via scene.

Even if you don’t adopt this structure for absolutely every scene you write, I’d encourage you to try it for any big revelation in your novel: a plot twist, a new story element, the news that a trusted ally has gone over to the other side, etc.

Now I’d love to hear from you. Have you heard of this sort of structure for scenes? Do you use it in yours? (And if not, what is the most useful technique you’ve found for creating vivid and memorable scenes?)

Note from Jane: On Wednesday, Feb. 12, Susan is offering a free masterclass for fiction writers: Mastering the Art of Scene.

Turn Your Short Pieces Into a Finished Nonfiction Book

Photo by Giulia May on Unsplash

Today’s post is by author Lara Lillibridge.

Have you amassed a heap of assorted essays, flash pieces, chapters, ideas, and you think you have enough to turn it into a book? Does it seem scattered and overwhelming and you’re not sure what will fit where and it is all rather daunting?

Never fear—here is a step-by-step guide to turn your hot mess into a hot dish.

1. Ask yourself, “What is my book about?”

Come up with an organizing question or statement. Every collection has a theme or arc beyond “These are the best things I’ve written so they should be a book.” Sadly, that’s a hard book to sell.

This process is similar to the old Twitter pitchfests where we had to describe our books in one tweet, back when there were character limits.

Here are examples from my own work:

Which was more formative: Having a lesbian parent, or a bipolar one?What do you owe an abusive/negligent father, now that he is old and lonely?My journey out of divorce, through six years of single parenting, and into the family blender with my new partner.

The benefit of this exercise is that you can pull out this line at every future coffee hour or cocktail party when people ask what your book is about, as well as use it to start your query letter.

2. Sort out what you have written.What are your major themes?What ages or time periods are you writing about?Do you have a bunch of chapters that are different lengths, styles, or points of view?3. Make a list of every chapter or essay—or print out the entire project.

Assign a color for each category you chose in step 2. For example, highlight all the life stages by color, or use different colors for different lengths.

Here’s an example from one of my early drafts:

And the same book, only with sticky notes:

By looking at the project by color, I was easily able to see that I didn’t have enough blue (religion) or purple (childhood) notes. I could also see that I had way too much going on. I chose to eliminate those categories from this project and save them for a future book.

4. Or, make a spreadsheet.

On the left, list all your chapters. Across the top, list all the themes or categories you have. Put an X in the box that each essay fits into.

5. Look at your project critically.

Step back and take a look. Do you have a preponderance of one color? Is your spreadsheet weighted heavily in a few categories? Do you have any outliers that are lone wolves?

6. Seriously consider each theme.

Where do you need to strengthen or write more? Can you take essays that fit into multiple categories and shape them to be stronger in one area or another?

If you are sorting by length, what is the rhythm of the collection? Do you have too many fragments in a row?

You can recolor your list as you look at these different topics. I like to save a new document, remove the highlights, and start over.

Here is another one of my projects, sorted by length:

I could easily see where I had too many flash pieces in a row.

7. Consider the emotional weight, particularly if you are writing about trauma.

I like to go through my list and rate each chapter based on the emotional intensity. Where will the reader get a breath of air?

Take a memoir or essay collection you love, and go through and assign an emotional weight to each chapter. This is just your opinion—you won’t be graded on it! Different people are affected by different things, so someone else may have a different numbering system. There are no wrong answers. What is the darkest/hardest chapter? How does the author create moments of light for the reader?

I did this with The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch. I graphed the results and came up with this:

It reminds me of swimming the breast stroke—after we go under into despair, we rise up to lighter moments. This keeps the reader coming back—it delves into heavy material but doesn’t overwhelm the reader to the point where they close the book and walk away.

8. Look at the time jumps.

Is there a flow or rhythm to the movement through time? Are you signaling the reader clearly when we flash back or forward?

9. What about repetition?

As the same theme comes up, are you expanding, narrowing on the theme so it is adding something new to the project? Or going over the same ground?

10. Consider arc.

Is your project moving to a place of change? Consider the arc of each theme. For example, my book, Mama, Mama, Only Mama, is a collection of essays, blogs, and recipes depicting my journey through single parenting.

Here are my thematic arcs:

Recipe for microwaving a frozen dinner to cooking a turkey and touching the carcassRaising kids from diapers to riding bike to school aloneMy relationship with my ex-husband from my walking out the door to wanting to send him a Father’s Day card11. Look at chapter flow.

For this I like to print out my chapters and lay them on the floor. Read every last line and see how it connects to the first line of the following chapter.

12. Ask the hard questions!Is your current structure serving you well?Would a different structure strengthen your manuscript?Do you have enough material for each theme?Do these essays really hang together? Or should some be split off into a different project?13. Visualize the flow by doodling.

If you are a more visual person, a fun way I learned to play around with ordering segments is from Rebecca Fish Ewan in her book Doodling for Writers. Take a stack of index cards, and draw a simple doodle representing what happens in each essay or chapter. A doodle can form an instant connection, as opposed to reading descriptive summaries over and over. Now lay out your doodles on the table and look at the flow. Move them around until the order pleases you.

Here is a segmented essay I was working on:

14. Congratulate yourself!

Once you have concluded that you have the best arrangement for your collection, congratulate yourself! Have an ice cream, a fancy coffee, or an umbrella drink, then find a beta reader or critique partner and get their opinion.

It’s Time to Interview Your Own Inner Diminisher

Photo by George Becker

Today’s post is by writer and creativity coach Anne Carley (@amcarley.bsky.social) who is a fan of #becomingunstuck.

Do you feel stuck because you’re convinced that you’re just shoving words around, not really being creative? 

Do you often notice harsh commentary in the background when you draft and/or review your words?

Does a voice inside natter or spew or snipe at you?

If taking a break, drinking water, slicing vegetables, or other simple fixes aren’t freeing you from the influence of that voice, consider addressing the judgy elephant in the room.

Whose voice is telling you that you’re not creative?

What is and isn’t creative

My friend, Jan, spoke calmly. “I wasn’t being creative. I was just picking up words and phrases and changing them around.”

I said, “That’s what being creative is.”

Jan was visibly startled and asked, “How can you say that? I’m shocked that you’d think that.”

As we kept talking, Jan explained their belief that “creativity” is limited to the supreme artistry of the handful of people at the pinnacles of excellent work—the people who do it effortlessly, who lived on a different plane from the rest of us. Jan learned this in childhood, and has always lived with that narrow view. Creativity belonged only to world-famous artists, performers, writers, and inventors—not regular people. And those supernovas didn’t have to work for it, either.

I encouraged Jan to pause and appreciate their problem-solving skills. Pause and appreciate that they can make something from nothing. Pause and appreciate the beneficial impact their words have on others.

“Normal” creativity

Consider your own inner diminisher. Jan’s told them they had nothing creative to offer because Jan wasn’t Michelangelo or Toni Morrison or J.S. Bach. Who do you compare yourself to? Whose stellar achievements make yours look shabby and small? What does “normal” creativity look like to you? Like Jan, do you get smacked down by these messages so routinely that you consider it a cost of doing business—just part of an often miserable writing process?

Who taught you that your talents as a writer are limited or nonexistent? Who suggested that you’re not creative enough? Is that person worth listening to? Does that person deserve to hold power over you?

If any of this sounds familiar, you may want to conduct an interview with the source(s) of that negative commentary.

Whose voice is it?

Sometimes writers know at once who’s speaking in these unhelpful, critical ways. It’s often a close relative or teacher from the past. With other writers, the voice is a composite of fears and hidden desires. Sometimes it’s the “mean girls” and their ilk, from the writer’s middle school or adolescent years.

My father taught voice and directed choral groups. When he chatted with an adult who announced an inability to sing—and usually declared, “I can’t carry a tune in a bucket”—my dad asked this:

“Who taught you that?”

Invariably, he explained, every person had an answer. They recalled the exact details: the name, role (teacher, choir director, relative), and time in childhood when this determination was made.

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Take the time you need to recognize the source or sources of the unhelpful voice(s) inside you. Then interview yourself. Is this commentary to be trusted? Whose is it? Is it your voice, or someone else’s? Like Jan, did someone instill such high standards in you that nothing you ever do will measure up? Like my dad’s singers, did someone crush your creative dreams when you were young? Do you still hear those judgmental opinions inside your head, as though they are your own?

Gaining a little distance, separating you from the pesky unhelpful voice, can be an important step toward creative confidence and autonomy. We work hard enough at our craft. Jettisoning external impediments—like the messages that aren’t even ours—makes a lot of sense.

Do you notice that your writing gets a little easier when you dismiss the voices that aren’t yours?

Note from Jane: This post is based in part on “Who Taught You That?”, a tool from Anne Carley’s handbook, FLOAT: Becoming Unstuck for Writers now available in its second edition wherever paperbacks and ebooks are sold.

Key Methods for Direct and Indirect Foreshadowing in Your Story

Photo by Nur Demirbaş

Today’s post is by editor Tiffany Yates Martin. Join her on Wednesday, Jan. 29, for the online class The Art of Foreshadowing.

Imagine Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring in a brightly illuminated studio, or anything Goya ever painted rendered in blazing strokes of Thomas Kinkaid-style light.

In story as in art, what’s hinted at in the shadows can add intriguing layers of depth and interest.

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which future developments in a story are hinted at before they happen, presaging what’s to come. It adds dimension to stories just as shading and shadow add it to visual images: Foreshadowing can heighten suspense and tension, increase momentum, raise a story’s stakes, deepen and develop characters, and pave in key plot developments to give the story more cohesion.

But just as in visual art, the finesse of foreshadowing is in how and where you direct the reader’s attention: How much you use, where, and what effect it creates in the story. The artist achieves those results using dark and light tones. Authors have a similar palette to work with: various shades of direct and indirect foreshadowing.

Direct foreshadowing

Direct foreshadowing is the kind readers are likely to notice, overt indications of future developments in the story that are generally used to create expectation, anticipation, or dread and thus increase suspense, stakes, and momentum.

Straightforward statements or details

This is the most overt type of direct foreshadowing, where some element of the story clearly sets up a future development.

In the first episode of season two of the Apple TV show Shrinking, for instance, Harrison Ford’s psychologist character tells Jimmy, a protégé in the practice who has been struggling since his wife was killed by a drunk driver, “You can’t spend your life hiding from your trauma. If you don’t truly deal with your past, it’ll come back for you.” The rest of the season deals with the fallout of exactly that happening, both literally and figuratively.

This kind of overt foreshadowing can be used anywhere in the story: within the narrative, dialogue, the title, epigraph, even the chapter or part headings. The title of Death of a Salesman flat-out portends the play’s ending. Liane Moriarty foreshadows central story developments that result from one of the protagonists opening a sealed letter with both the title of her novel The Husband’s Secret and its epigraph about Pandora and her release of “dreadful ills” into the world.

Prophecy and premonition

These are explicit promises or statements about what’s to come in the story—even if they may not turn out to be literally true or are misinterpreted by the readers or characters.

This can be as straightforward as the literal prophecies the witches offer to Macbeth, which give him false confidence in his invincibility as king but whose meanings later prove catastrophically different from the way Macbeth takes them, or a fortune-teller who prophesies a character’s future that plays out in the story.

But prophecy and premonition can also come in forms that aren’t quite so literal, like one character telling another, “One day you’ll be sorry you treated me this way, and you’ll pay,” or the protagonist reflecting, “I had the disquieting certainty that nothing would ever be the same after this moment.”

Chekhov’s gun

The origin of this narrative principle arose from Anton Chekhov’s advice to a fellow writer: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off,” meaning writers should avoid making false promises to readers. But as a literary device it’s often taken more broadly to indicate an item or element that appears earlier in the story before playing a key role in it later.

In the recent Netflix series No Good Deed, a literal gun is used to foreshadow later events: Ray Romano’s character retrieves a revolver from a hiding place in his home and stashes it in his famous musician wife’s piano; both items later play pivotal roles in the story.

In Knives Out, the prominently featured collection of knives collected by the murder victim that viewers see displayed throughout the film plays a central role in the climax—an event also foreshadowed by the detective’s description earlier in the story of the eventually revealed killer as “Confident, stupid and protected, playing life like a game without consequence until you can’t tell the difference between a stage prop and a real knife.”

Indirect foreshadowing

Indirect foreshadowing is often more subtle than direct foreshadowing, and may even go unnoticed by readers until the later events it augurs are revealed, or upon rereading. Most often it’s used in laying key groundwork for those later developments: paving in details about the characters or plot that will make them more organic, cohesive, and inevitable.

This type of foreshadowing is also likely to be employed more liberally than direct foreshadowing, precisely for those reasons: It’s an often crucial tool for adequately developing character and plot, and can be smoothly and almost invisibly painted into the story throughout, like the shadows in a still-life, to add verisimilitude and depth.

Breadcrumbs and clues

This type of indirect foreshadowing isn’t just for mysteries and thrillers, but crucial in any genre to plant seeds for later developments that might otherwise feel unjustified or sprung on readers, or like an author device. Early in The Hunger Games, for instance, we see Katniss expertly using her bow and arrow to hunt for food—a skill that later plays an essential role in her survival of the titular games.

Threading in clues about a character’s test anxiety or panic attacks, for example, lends greater cohesion and inevitability when we later see they choke during the bar exam; clues about an estranged father and mention of the letter the protagonist wrote him that was never answered keeps his unexpected reappearance in act three from feeling like a deus ex machina; paving in breadcrumbs about a character’s paralyzing fear of heights organically sets up and raises stakes on their climactic struggle to walk onto the Golden Gate Bridge to talk their best friend out of jumping.

Indirect foreshadowing can also come in the form of a statement, but unlike direct-foreshadowing statements they may not be readily recognizable as foreshadowing until later, like the detective’s comment about the killer in Knives Out, or Haley Joel Osment’s character telling Bruce Willis’s in Sixth Sense, “Dead people don’t know they’re dead,” or a sleepless Tyler Durden at the beginning of Fight Club flat-out telling viewers, “With insomnia, nothing’s real.”

Echoed events

Earlier events or developments in a story can presage similar later higher-stakes developments. In The Hunger Games, Katniss saves Peeta from eating poisonous berries, remembering her father’s warnings about them—an event later echoed at the end with a twist, when she gives them to Peeta so both can eat them to kill themselves together rather than turn on each other, and outfox the rules of the game.

In the Ryan Reynolds movie Free Guy, video game designer Keys and his programmer buddy Mouser enter their game as characters to track down “Guy,” a non-player character gone rogue, manipulating the game environment from the real world to advantage their characters in the game. Those actions are later mirrored in the climax when Keys is on his computer in the real world programming changes to help Guy reach a key objective within the game, as Mouser works against Keys on his own computer to try to stop them.

Symbols/motifs

Using symbolic representations of events to come is a sort of foreshadowing shorthand that can create under-the-radar tension and suspense in readers. In The Godfather movie, the appearance of oranges (the fruit) in a scene indicate impending death and violence; in The Sixth Sense the color red indicates when the spirit world is brushing against the corporeal one.

Readers may not pick up on the symbolism until later in the story or a subsequent read, but it can help create a subconscious expectation or foreboding and lend a feeling of cohesion or inevitability to the story.

Mood/tone/atmosphere

There’s a reason “It was a dark and stormy night” is such a literary cliché; setting a mood or tone can be a viscerally potent way of foreshadowing a story’s later events.

In the movie Edward Scissorhands, reclusive Frankenstein creation Edward lives in a bleak, dark castle atop a gloomy hill that looks down over a cheery pastel-colored community, foreshadowing the joy, belonging, and love he finds when an intrepid door-to-door makeup saleswoman brings him down from his stark solitude in the castle to her home in the neighborhood below.

The film Shutter Island opens with the main character seasick on a ferry traveling under a cloudy gray sky and haunted by creepily scored memories of his wife, headed toward the stark, shadowy, isolated island that houses the mental institution he and his partner have been sent to investigate. The moody atmosphere sets the tone of this dark, twisty story, creating a feeling of unease and dread in readers that signals the protagonist’s slow unraveling on the island.

Finessing foreshadowing

Understanding the main types of foreshadowing is the foundation for executing it well.

Clumsily placed direct foreshadowing can feel heavy-handed and can actually have the opposite effect you intend, defusing suspense rather than accelerating it.

Inexpert indirect foreshadowing can feel cryptic or confusing to readers if it’s too vague. Or if underutilized, it can undermine the cohesion of the plot and make later developments feel inauthentic or sprung on readers.

The key to finessing this powerful device is understanding what type to use, and where, to shade in the story’s depth, meaning, and nuance.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, join us on Wednesday, Jan. 29 for the online class The Art of Foreshadowing.

3 Aspects of Managing the Clutter-Tidiness Continuum

Photo by Pixabay

Today’s post is by writer and creativity coach Anne Carley (@amcarley.bsky.social) who believes #becomingunstuck is an ongoing process.

When we feel in opposition to our surroundings, we suffer needlessly. When things are too chaotic, we sometimes push to reduce the chaos—cleaning, sorting, donating, pruning—while sometimes, paradoxically, we blunder toward denial, distraction, and further cluttering. One more aspect of the clutter–tidiness continuum is the recognition that your own preferences may change. For example, does the occasional tidying sweep of your desk cheer you up? Do you discover, while tidying, those notes and files that you knew had gone missing? Or do you enjoy piling things up for the duration of a project and then doing a massive celebratory cleanup at the end?

External objects aren’t the only things to consider. When a project itself is confusing to you, that can be a sign that it’s time to stop ignoring the skewed relationships and cluttered thinking that may have gotten you there. Following is a quick look at ways to unclutter stuff, people, and the words we write.

1. Uncluttering Stuff

It’s true that clearing objects can clear your head. But sometimes maintaining physical chaos is a way of exerting control over something—anything—when the rest of life can feel out of our hands. Not-clearing might not actually be about stuff at all, perhaps concealing a fear of death instead.

Note: Clutter can be entangled with responses to deep trauma. Trained trauma-informed experts know gentle and effective ways to work with these matters.

Oliver Burkeman reassures us that, once we accept that life’s too short for us to get it all done in one lifetime, we can relax and just choose one next step. Anne Lamott puts it this way: “I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won’t have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren’t even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they’re doing it.”

Chaos and order

Do you know how much chaos you thrive in? Where are you on the clutter-tidiness continuum? As Dahlia Lithwick so succinctly asked, are you a Chaos Muppet or an Order Muppet? This question, answered honestly, may help you as you shape your work environment to suit you and support your creativity. One person’s cluttered studio is another person’s warm and happy workplace. Know yourself. To me, one key to understanding your acceptable level of chaos is whether you can find the resources you need when you want them. If you can, then the ‘clutter’ may not be important.

Other people

You can enjoy a lot more latitude around the nature of your workspace if you can reserve it for yourself alone. If, instead, it’s in a shared space, whether with loved ones, housemates, studio mates, fellow coffee-drinkers, or your landlord, you’ve got some additional considerations to manage.

2. Uncluttering People

Speaking of people, is it possible you need to pull back from some relationships that are cluttering up your creative life? For me, even though there are ways to say no that I am theoretically comfortable with, I still hear this inner voice sometimes that tells me being polite, or just going along, is more important than standing up for what is important to me. Early childhood training, I guess. Can you relate?

Let’s say that you’ve known this person for years. They are routinely self-absorbed, critical of others, including you, and negative in their view of the world. On the other hand, they’ve been helpful to you in the past, in your career, and maybe even as a friend. Can you turn your back on them now? Maybe so. Is your obligation to maintain a relationship more important than your values, your wellbeing, and your meaningful creative work?

Where are you when it comes to people who crowd your psychic space? Are those relationships worthwhile for you now, in light of your creative priorities? Are they chaos agents at a time when you could use a little more order in your life?

3. Uncluttering Words

Another area where clutter can accumulate, besides with stuff and people, is in the written texts themselves. Are there places where the words don’t sing? Do saggy sentences get you down? Revise your work like a slightly impatient stranger would. Remove extra words/notes/figures/ideas. Don’t say the same thing two or three ways. Cut. Cut. Cut. Remove the cut material to compost if you like. You’re not murdering your darlings, just keeping them somewhere cozy, off to the side.

Here’s one example that can have a big impact: Search your writing for unintentionally included filter words that distance the reader from your meaning. A long manuscript of mine once dropped a few thousand words that way. What a great pleasure that was to lop them away, bit by bit.

When you unclutter your words, in effect you are challenging yourself to take creative risks from a place of strength. This means looking at yourself differently. Being bold. It’s a shock to see how different life is when it’s not governed by fear. The fear doesn’t go away. You can’t expect that to happen. Living with it though, on good terms, can really work.

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Uncluttering your stuff, the people in your life, and your words can streamline your entire process. You can take this challenge on gradually, one task at a time, and pace yourself according to your shifting moods and capabilities. Bottom line: When you reduce unwanted clutter you reduce daily stress, which opens up lovely new possibilities for your creative life.

How to Find Your Memoir’s Narrative Arc (There May Be More Than One)

Photo by Willian Justen de Vasconcellos on Unsplash

Today’s post is by Bonny Reichert, author of How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty.

It was a frigid January afternoon, four years ago, when, after a pile of earlier drafts, I sent the version of my book proposal that my agent finally deemed “ready.” We had met at an online speed-dating-type event for authors and agents and, after signing, we’d been working together on this one document for about six months. Many parts of the proposal, like the pitch and the summary, the description of audience and the proposed marketing plan, had come together relatively easily.

“But how are the outline and chapter summaries coming along?” said my agent—I’ll call her Jenn—every time we spoke on the phone. “What about the narrative arc?”

“Right,” I said firmly. “I’m working on that.”

“Good,” Jenn said. “Because honestly, nothing is more important than the arc.”

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The book, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty (released today, with Ballantine PRH in the US and Appetite PRH in Canada) is a food memoir about my experience growing up in the shadow of a traumatic family history, and my journey toward discovering who I am in spite—and because—of that history.

My dad almost starved to death during the Holocaust, and it was stepping into the kitchen and becoming a chef myself that ultimately helped me find joy and make peace with the past. But back when Jenn and I were working on the proposal, I knew the book was about food and my dad and resilience and the Holocaust, and not much more. A progression? An arc? Truthfully, I had no idea.

What I did know was a bit about how to fake it ’til you make it. So, I began to map out chapters, corresponding to key events from my past, as well as foods and food memories that were significant. Soon I noticed clusters: a large cluster of events (and flavors) from childhood; another forming around a short trip to Warsaw I took with my dad as a younger adult; a third big cluster from a more recent solo trip to the ghettos and concentration camps of Poland. From there it wasn’t much of a leap to see that the book would begin in childhood and end sometime after that second trip to Poland. To find the arc, all I had to do was connect the dots chronologically, right?

For the proposal, I managed to create chapter summaries that were fluid enough to convince Jenn that I had the arc figured out, and good enough to get the unwritten book sold at auction in both the US and Canada with a few sample chapters. It was a better outcome than I could have imagined, and I was thrilled. It was not until I started to write in earnest that I realized I had a problem.

The problem was not the first third of the book which, in my outline and summaries, was too long and too detailed but still well defined. Nor was it the last third which, once I had come up with my structure, came to me in a rush, almost fully formed. No, fellow writers, it was the middle, which was a thin rickety bridge I was trying to build between the solid poles of beginning and end.

A memoir is not the story of your life, but a story from your life. I knew this and yet, I didn’t really understand it until I found myself attempting to write my way from childhood to midlife without stopping at every heart break, career change and childbirth along the way.

I did my best, and I got my first draft in on time. When it came back from my editor, it had many admiring and encouraging notes, but the ones that said, about some of the middle chapters, “Why is this here?” and “What does this mean?” were the most confounding. And the most important.

I struggled with the next draft for several weeks, until my editor helped me realize I had to take the middle of the book apart to liberate it from the constraints of strict chronology. I had to cut and regroup and sharpen. I had to transform real life into a narrative path specific to my book, my themes and my message.

Here are some of the tools I used to make that transformation:

Chart the emotional journey of the book—try to draw it. Where is the inciting incident, rising action, climax(es), denouement? Where is the book flat, emotionally?Dig deeper into those flat or saggy sections. Use reverse outlining to discover what those passages are saying and doing within the context of the book’s journey.Move problem sections around according to narrative and emotional logic. For example, when I reverse outlined, I noticed I had a few different moments of “existential crisis” sprinkled over seventy pages. Once I decided to group them together thematically, the section began to sing.Understand there will be many things you want to say that don’t fit the book you’re writing. What is emotionally resonant in your life is not necessarily the same as what resonates for the reader inside the world of the book.Don’t try to force your story into any particular shape. The point is just that you’re working deliberately and charting a path with intention. Some “arcs” are not arcs at all but zig zags, spirals, reverse arcs, etc.

How to Share an Egg was in copy when I was preparing to speak at a memoir conference on this exact topic last spring. It had been several weeks since I’d looked at the book, and I pulled out the bound pages my publisher had sent and studied them with a little more distance. It was only then that I noticed something I hadn’t seen before. The book doesn’t have one single arc, but rather, a series of them: There is the main arc that carries the plot about the character (me) and her journey to come to terms with her family’s past (the Holocaust), and then there are others—a “food arc,” that traces the culinary journey of the book; a “dad arc” that charts the changing relationship between father and daughter; a romantic arc that tracks a divorce and the relationship after it, etc. The arcs overlap, and they peak and valley at slightly different times, but overall, their shapes are similar, resolving, for the most part, by the end of the book.

Before my talk last spring, I charted these arcs on a sheet of paper: black for the main arc, pink for food, blue for the Dad arc, and green for romance. Together they look like a colorful mountain range. I keep this diagram taped to the wall near my desk as I begin work my next book. It’s not that it’s going to help in any practical way—every book is different, and I know there are no shortcuts. Still, it makes me happy to know my creative mind was making something logical and organized before my quotidian self even had a clue.

Learn more about How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love, and Plenty by Bonny Reichert.

How Deliberate Practice Can Develop Your Writing Skills and Talent

Saint Jerome in His Study by Domenico Ghirlandaio (1480)

Today’s post is excerpted from Deliberate Practice for Creative Writers by Jules Horne.

Do you believe excellence is in someone’s nature—an innate golden gift they were born with?

Or does it come from nurture—learning, effort, passion and commitment?

Of course, nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy. Born talent and learned talent—in any skill—can’t be separated. They reinforce and inspire each other.

But still, it’s good to examine critically the theory that some people are natural born geniuses in their field, while others get there through learning and practice.

Because one way of thinking is empowering, and the other is profoundly disempowering. And I definitely prefer empowering.

Let’s look at nature first—the idea that people excel because they’re a natural born star.

Well, it’s true that some people have enormous natural advantages in life. Maybe you’re supersensitive to audio and sound pitches, and become a musician. Or have an amazing eye and steady nerves, and try your hand at archery or wildlife photography.

And then, there’s your environment, which is immensely important for learning.

We all have latent talent for many things—writing, gardening, engineering, leadership. But we become good at specific things, in part because of the people and opportunities around us. Mentors, inspirational people, and access to practical equipment.

Bill Gates had a basic computer as a teenager, and spent hours hunkered away, learning how to use it.

The Polgar sisters had a chess-savvy father as their personal trainer.

If you’re a keen angler, you might have friends or family who go fishing, and nurture your interest.

If you’re a guitarist or drummer, you might have friends to jam with, and tips and musical inspirations to share.

Those extra factors spark your latent interest, and make you keen to learn more. So, it’s a self-reinforcing loop.

But maybe you’re on your own, with an unusual passion that nobody else in the neighborhood really gets?

Well, that can be motivational, too. Maybe you have more determination despite everyone—precisely because you’re on your own.

The poet Emily Dickinson was an unconventional recluse whose work was mostly unrecognized in her lifetime. Ray Bradbury was mocked as a child for his love of science fiction and fantasy. The painter Vincent Van Gogh was also marginalized for his uniqueness. The professor of animal science Temple Grandin was misunderstood due to her autism.

Yet all persevered with great passion and became outstanding and influential in their field, despite their uniqueness—or because of it?

Maybe if other people don’t helpfully validate you, you just get on with what you love?

Nature and nurture are so complicatedly interwoven with our individual psychologies and situations.

And in the history of education, the emphasis has shifted between nature and nurture, with each dominating at different times, as different research findings and ideologies come through.

During my teacher training in the 1980s/90s, nurture was dominant. The thinking was: Excellence isn’t simply an innate talent. It can be taught and practiced. This learning movement was influenced by the work of psychologist B.F. Skinner on behaviorism.

The focus was on learning through physical actions, rather than just mental states. “Skills and drills”, repetition and practice, were the way to go.

If you learned French at the time, you might recall the words écoutez et répétez—listen and repeat. I’m a visual learner, so it didn’t go well for me.

Try this
Take a moment to think through times when you learned effectively, and when you didn’t. What sort of situations? Was it quiet, noisy, calm, busy? Were you on your own, with a coach, or in a classroom? What senses were you using? This will be useful for when you’re designing your own unique deliberate practice.

But in time, the pendulum swung in the nature-nurture debate. At the turn of the millennium, influential books such as The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris and The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker reasserted a focus on nature.

Harris found that learning was more influenced by genes and peer groups than by the nurture of parents and the home. Pinker emphasized biology, rejecting the idea of humans born as blank slates and created by their cultural surroundings. Nature was back in charge.

However, the pendulum has now swung firmly back to nurture, and the importance of learning and practice. This still holds today. It’s a far more more optimistic view, and aligns well with new opportunities for bitesize and individualized learning online.

What led to this change? A big influence on the swing back to nurture was a research paper with the unwieldy title, The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. This study by Professor Anders Ericsson looked into what it takes to make an expert. And it might have stayed hidden in academic backwaters, if it hadn’t inspired Malcolm Gladwell to write his bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success.

Even if you’ve not read the book, you’ve probably come across the 10,000 hours idea: that to achieve excellence in any field, you need to put in around—well, 10,000 hours.

The catchy number popularised by Gladwell ignited the public imagination. Maybe we can all become superstars, if we put our minds to it?

To me, it sounds both encouraging and impossible, so I’ve chunked it down to a more manageable concept. It works out at about 20 hours a week, across a decade. That’s about three hours a day, every day, for ten years.

At this point, intriguingly, 10,000 hours starts to chime with other time and practice concepts: Stephen King’s 2,000 words a day, every day. Ray Bradbury’s daily writing in the library, a story a week. Ursula LeGuin’s daily schedule.

The upshot is: it’s about putting the work in.

Of course, 10,000 hours of practice is simplistic. Not everyone who puts the work in achieves excellence.

There was an inevitable backlash. It’s a myth! I’ve been playing guitar for 40 years and still haven’t improved. 10,000 hours will never turn me into a shot-putter—I don’t have that physical ability.

But neither Gladwell nor Ericsson claimed that 10,000 hours of practice is a cast-iron guarantee of success. Ericsson simply uncovered a rough average time that skilled performers took to reach expert level.

And his crucial finding: it’s not about the number of hours you practice—it’s about how you spend them. Quality, not quantity. And the key is: deliberate practice.

Ericsson’s research showed that deliberate practice is a powerful learning strategy for improving performance. He discusses the psychology, the process, and, importantly, practical ways to apply it.

His findings are now a significant element of best practice in education and learning.

Do an online search for “deliberate practice in education,” and you’ll find thousands of sites where teachers are discussing the topic. Deliberate practice is viewed as the backbone of purposeful, systematic learning.

This makes it a great fit for individualized learning, for self-study, and for people short of time.

So many of the literary life stories we love to read are wild, exciting whirlwinds of romance, genius and rock-and-roll habits. If you love this, and find it helps you to write, great.

But if you’re skeptical, it’s worth looking into what might lie behind it, and how deliberate practice can help.

Try this
Invent your own muse. Think back to people who have inspired you in the past. Who lights up your life and gets you excited? Who challenges you with their incisive views and new knowledge? Who is a stern, wise critic who takes no nonsense and sets high standards? Who is way ahead of you on a similar path and is someone to look up to? Who makes you feel strong and alive as a creator? Brainstorm your ideal attributes, fuse them into a character, and have a conversation with them. You might start by asking questions: “What do you want to tell me?” “What do you see as my biggest challenge?” and writing what they tell you.

Try this
Consider the opposite of your ideal muse—your anti-muse. What sort of attributes do they have? What experiences have felt to you like an anti-muse? Brainstorm what you find. What can you learn from this about your needs? What relationships and experiences help you to thrive, and what makes your creativity wither? If you consider the anti-muse as a character, how might you transform them into writing gold, and loosen their power?

Try this
Set up an invisible committee of mentors. You have an unlimited budget, so choose the best. The people can be real or fictional, close family, media stars, historical figures. They don’t have to be friendly, or patient—any committee needs a mix of skills and viewpoints. Crucially, they’re all on your side. You might like to look into Carl Jung’s archetypes to discover more about the internalized mentor figures we all share, or draw on a mix of modern and older archetypes: the Sage, the Critical Friend, the Healer, the Rebel, the Trickster, the Innovator.

Note from Jane: If you enjoyed this post, be sure to check out the book Deliberate Practice for Creative Writers by Jules Horne.