Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

How’s the challenge going? If you’ve just discovered the podcast and haven’t listened to Episode 50, “Stop Waiting for Last-Minute Writing Inspiration,” you might want to go back and listen. At the end, I issued a 50-Headline Challenge in honor of the 50th episode: write 50 headlines in the week ahead. About a week has passed, and I’ve been hearing from people who took it on. Two days after episode 50 went live, Kate Motaung tweeted that she already had 23 of her 50 written. https://twitter.com/k8motaung/status/732537449436590080 Jessica Van Roekel left a comment at the show notes saying she wrote 50 headlines in an hour. People are doing the work and finding it fruitful. When I started, I thought 50 headlines or titles sounded like a lot, but once I got going, the ideas flowed and suddenly 50 seemed well within reach. I’d take a break and come back to it, and then boom! Another batch would come to me. I counted and realized I’d hit 50 headlines easily. It didn’t feel overwhelming at all. And I feel li

My life presents numerous complications making it hard to plan ahead or get ahead. One simple practice I’ve begun is to stop waiting around for last-minute writing inspiration and instead, generate ideas that can be waiting in the wings, for their chance to step onto the screen and become a blog post, podcast, article or even a book project. That way when some time opens up to write, I don’t spend half that time trying to come up with an idea; instead, I choose from my existing list. Jon Morrow's Massive Headline Output Not long ago, I was listening to a Duct Tape Marketing interview with Copyblogger writer Jon Morrow. In it, Jon said he likes to focus on the emotion he wants to bring out in the reader. The interviewer asked him about his practice for finding that target emotion, and Jon explained that Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger, gave Jon an assignment early on when they started working together. Brian told John to write 100 headlines a day for different blog posts and get really good at it. And

This one’s for the moms out there who are also writers. Writer moms. My mom was a writer mom. I am a writer mom. You might be a writer mom, too. And I'm sure you know one. Please know this: Writer moms are trying to raise their family while advancing their writing in some way. And it’s hard. Madeleine L'Engle once wrote in one of her Crosswicks Journals: During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump. (p. 19) I got a chance to hear Madeleine speak one time, and afterwards she signed books. I would have one instant to ask her about that—to ask about writing and motherhood. We waited and inched forward in line until it was finally my turn. I handed her Walking on Water. She asked for my name and scrawled a note on one of its front pages. She looked up and handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said. Then I bl

We feel like so much is at stake in our writing lives, the pressure is on. Let’s make writing fun again. Let's find the joy of writing.

Episode #47: Don't Be Afraid to Evolve The Evolution of Projects Don’t be afraid of letting a writing piece sit until the idea grows and matures to the point where you feel you’ve got a handle on it. It happens with lots of writing projects, as drafts 1 to 20 and beyond take a twist or turn, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry or essays. Book proposals are an interesting example, especially nonfiction proposals. The author puts together an idea he feels great about and submits it. The agent or acquisitions editor shows interest, but contacts the author saying they like it, but would like to see some tweaks and changes. If the heart of the message or idea remains and the author has the time, energy, and grit, I’d encourage him to go for it. Don’t be afraid to let that project evolve to give that publisher what they think will sell in the market and best serve their readers. The evolution of an individual project is an expected part of the writing process, but don’t be afraid to evolve as a writer. The Evol

Summary and Show Notes Episode #46: What's the Big Idea? Whether you start writing and discover what you want to say as the words spill out, or you outline and plot it all out in advance, either way, you probably have a big idea. With the first method, you may not be able to articulate it up front, but I’ll bet some spark of a driving thought sent you to the screen or the page. As you write, the big idea becomes clearer and clearer. If you are the latter personality as a writer—the outliner or plotter—you probably couldn’t organize your material if you didn’t have that controlling idea. Back in high school and college, the big idea might have been called the controlling idea or the thesis. Remember the thesis? You were probably trained to express it as one sentence—a statement that is, in fact, arguable. The thesis statement expresses the big idea of your project in that one sentence and then you set out to explore and support this statement. That seems so...academic. Author and writing coach Jack Hart

Show Notes  Episode #45: You Don't Have to Do It All The writing life involves a lot more than writing. These days a writer has to at least consider blogging, even if she isn’t officially a blogger. A writer has to build up an online presence and think about platform, encouraging likes, follows, and pins. A writer is encouraged to do readings and speak and present. Writers learn to propose and pitch and query, and to promote their work online and in real life. We do all this when all we really want to do is sit down and pen a few lines of poetry, write another romance novel, compose a screenplay, or finish the draft of an article for a dream publication. As the list grows long, we start to see things sitting unfinished and half-done on our screen or our to-do list. We can’t get everything done. We can’t. We’re just one person trying to write something meaningful, something funny, something true. Sometimes we’re going to have to pick just one thing, do that well, and be okay with the rest waiting another d

Show Notes  Episode #44: Why Every Writer Needs a Buddy You may feel like such an introvert, you don’t want or need a writing buddy. And it’s true that most of the time you do the work of writing all by yourself. When you write, it’s just you and the keyboard...it’s just you and the screen. But let’s say you finished the draft of an essay you plan to submit to a literary journal, and you really want another set of eyes. Wouldn’t it be nice to phone another writer—someone who could provide a little input? You could swap projects and offer a few thoughts on each other's work. Wouldn’t that be a great gift to both of you? Or maybe you simply hold each other accountable to deadlines and goals in a weekly or monthly check-in. If one of you is stuck on a project, the other could offer ideas as you talk it through. In this episode, I suggest where to find a writing buddy, when you should ask someone to be a mentor or coach instead of a buddy, and what you can gain from forming this relationship. I hope you ca

Show Notes  Episode #43: How to Avoid Distraction and Manage Attention to Write In this episode, I take both a macro and micro view of attention, focus, and distraction. At the macro level, I suggest that formulating a general plan of where you’d like to go as a writer will make it easier to focus your attention on how a given activity fits into the big picture (and you can more easily resist Shiny Object Syndrome). At the micro level, we can focus our attention by minimizing everyday, moment-by-moment distractions. Clear your desk. Try the Pomodoro technique. When you launch your writing session, silence phone notifications, close the browser. You can even try using the "focus" view in Word to minimize visual distractions on the screen. In addition, we can learn to become "meta-aware," noticing when our mind is wandering. When we increase meta-awareness, we can learn to nudge our mind back to the task at hand by telling ourselves, “Okay, I’m writing now. So, quiet. I’m trying to concentrate." Listen fo

Show Notes  Episode #42: Manage Your Energy So You Can Write In this longer-than-normal episode (over 7 minutes), I offer ideas for how to manage your energy as a writer. You’ve taken charge of your writing space and begun to prioritize it. You’ve figured out where your time is going and now you're scheduling a regular writing slot and/or grabbing opportunities where you can. Now it’s time to manage your energy to make the most of that time. Takeaway 1: Managing our energy starts with identifying activities that energize or drain us. If you do something for 40 minutes that drains you while I do something for those same 40 minutes that energizes me, I'll be able to continue making progress without much of a break, while you may need to pause and create some space. Takeaway 2: Doing an energy audit can help us understand the flow of our days—our natural peak energy hours, and the times of day we dip into valleys. Whenever possible, we can schedule writing for peak energy, when creativity is at its max. T

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #41: 5 Steps to Find Time for Writing This week I planned to record a podcast about managing time and—wouldn't you know it—I had absolutely no time to record it. I’m not 100 percent sure that’s situational irony, but I can tell you it is definitely 100 percent frustrating. At any rate, I finally snatched some time to record it, and I'm offering five steps to find time for writing. The steps are: Figure out what you're doing with your days. Stop doing some of those things by eliminating, delegating, or pausing anything you can. Determine if you're in a chaotic season, and if you are, admit it and as much as possible, embrace it. If you have a predictable schedule, block off time for writing; if you're in a chaotic season, be ready to snatch an opportunity when time opens up. When you find the time, write. Soon you'll see how managing our energy and attention fits together with managing our space and time, but we have to find time for writing before we can make the most

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #40: Take Charge of Your Writing Space, Tasks, and Projects Episode 38 introduced four major areas we can manage: our writing space, time, energy, and attention. The next week, in episode 39, I posed a series of questions to help us evaluate our writing spaces in order to create a master "punch list" to work through in the week ahead. In this episode, I review some progress I made on my own punch list; remind us to add a whimsical, playful element to our workspace; and then dive into another aspect of our space—ways to manage our writing tasks and projects. Whether you choose an analog or digital solution (or a combination of both), dump everything into one task management or project management system and commit to it. Have your system (journal, notebook, checklist, or app) with you at all times to store any ideas that come to mind. Finally, before we leave the topic of managing our space and move on to managing our time, I suggest thinking through a system for storing and ac

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #39: Manage Your Writing Space to Be a More Productive Writer In the last episode I introduced four areas we writers can begin to evaluate and inventory in order to increase productivity: our writing space, time, energy, and attention. My hope is that through this series we see ways to prioritize our writing—and ourselves as writers—so that our decisions reflect that priority. When we manage our writing lives with intentionality, our space, time, energy and attention can be arranged to reduce barriers to productivity. The first goal is to manage our writing spaces. Maybe your space is a table at a coffee shop, maybe it’s a desk in the corner of your bedroom, or maybe it’s a dedicated home office. Are you in your writing space right now? If so, look around. If you're not in your writing space, try to visualize your space. Look at the flat surfaces and pause at the papers and any electronics you use. Think about your chair if you sit to work, and what’s at your fingertips. If

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #38: Manage Your Space, Time, Energy and Attention To be a more successful writer, you're probably going to have to be a more productive writer. To be more productive, it's best to learn to manage several things, including the space in which you work, the time you have to work, your energy levels, and your attention, or focus, on any given thing. I'm going to introduce them in today's episode and dive more deeply into them in successive episodes. Today, I want you to begin doing an evaluation or inventory of each of these four areas of your writing life: Space Time Energy levels Attention, or focus Pull out your favorite way to take notes, whether it's in Evernote or on a piece of paper, and start making lists. First, look at your space. If it's a mobile office, do you have what you need in the bag you carry with you to the coffee shop or library? If you have dedicated office space, take a look around. What's missing, what's working, what needs to change? Make it a prio

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #37: How Good Does My Writing Need to Be Online? Not long ago, writer, poet and blogger Christina Hubbard asked me, “How polished should a blog post be?” Shortly after she asked that, I saw a presentation by a successful young online entrepreneur who suggested that blogs can be a little sloppy; people reading online don’t mind an error here or there. Blogging’s casual, he said, so don’t worry about it—the mistakes make you more real. I couldn’t help but notice a similar message from another young online entrepreneur who trains business owners how to communicate their message more clearly. She urges people to get their message out there. Don’t let perfectionism hold you back, she says. Better to get the message out into the world than to wait forever and never take action because you’re afraid it’s not perfect—or you keep trying to make it perfect. What do you think? Is the first person right? Do people expect blog posts to be messy? Maybe some readers don’t mind. But then I

Show Notes: Episode #36: Why Writers Need Five Fat Files Years ago, I heard about author Elizabeth George’s five fat files. Her idea is to pick five areas you’d like to grow in and even develop into an expert in, and focus your resources on those five areas. They could be five ideas, topics, themes, or skills, and they are five areas you can live with for a long, long time. Because you’re investing in them in a way that invests in yourself as a writer, and as a person, over time. Already you might find yourself starting to sort through what you might make your main five files. To try to figure yours out, I suggest you begin by asking a few questions: First, where does your curiosity consistently carry you? Last week we talked about following the spark of interest and letting curiosity make us more creative writers. What sparks your interest? Over the years have you seen a trend? Another obvious question to ask is what do you already know a lot about? And...do you want to go deeper with it? An article a

Show Notes Summary: Episode #35: Want to Be a More Creative Writer? Get Curious! Curiosity can distract us from our work and disrupt our productivity. Curiosity can tempt us to waste time watching Buzzfeed and Upworthy videos, discover our friends' latest Facebook updates, tag trends on Twitter, and obsessively check weather reports. But curiosity is a powerful force—an energizing force—that can fuel our creativity if we lasso its power and funnel it in the right direction. Curiosity can lead us new ways of looking at the world, new people who can guide and inspire us. Curiosity can lead us to new books, new blogs, new podcasts, new poems, new ideas. Curiosity sends us in search of answers to questions, and solutions to problems. Curiosity is key to creativity. This month, I hosted the Play Project, where I encouraged people to engage in playful activities, to add fun to their days. Though I haven’t really linked the two ideas during the PlayProject, play and curiosity are complementary concepts. Curiosit

Show Notes Summary: When you wake up in the morning and dive into your to-do list—maybe you made it the night before, maybe in the morning, or maybe you make it up on the fly—isn't it gratifying to cross things off? It provides a sense of closure—of satisfaction—for getting something done. Then you move on to the next thing. It's a productive approach to make the list and check things off. But the tendency we can have is to continually look ahead to what we have yet to do, and never really stop, look back, and reflect on the day and say, "Look at all I got done!" So as writers, as we set out with a goal of writing 500 words or so many pages each day, at the end of that day it's almost like we press restart and look ahead to the next day rather than taking those few minutes to say, "Hey, I actually got that done!" Today I recommend you come up with a system to reflect at the end of the day on what you got done, so you can celebrate what's done! Productivity expert Claire Burge recommended to me an app cal

Show Notes   Summary: Last week I urged you to write that thing that scares you...and to get started by writing three sentences. Did you do that? Did you write those three sentences? I did. I dove straight into the thing that scares me and wrote three sentences. Then three more. Then a whole paragraph. And another. I got going and didn’t stop for two pages. Then, okay, then I stopped because I started to feel a bunch of feelings sloshing around inside me and I was sitting in the library and didn’t want to slosh out a lot of tears in front of the librarian helping a woman search for a biography. So I stopped writing for the day. The progress reminded me that a few sentences quickly grow to be a paragraph and another and next thing you know, you have a scene or a chapter. Committing to those first three sentences engaged my mind; once engaged, the ideas flowed. I would have continued had I been in a more private location. Another way of looking at those three sentences is that even if I’d managed only three

Show Notes Summary: Think of something you’ve really wanted to write...something that feels exciting to try, maybe a little risky to undertake...something you feel is urgent or important. And you haven’t written it yet because you’re scared. You could be scared for a lot of reasons: Maybe you’re a little scared because it’s a new style for you, or a new genre, and you feel you’ve don’t have the skills or experience to pull it off. Maybe you’re a little scared because it’s a new style, a new genre, and you’re afraid people may laugh at you for trying something other than what you’re known for. Maybe you’re a little scared because the subject matter is challenging or emotional. Maybe you’re a little scared because writing it will name other people and you’re afraid of the relational fallout. Maybe you’re a little scared because you start so many things and never finish them, you’re afraid this will be yet another project to add to the half-done list. You find it easier if you don’t start it at all. Yo