Good Writing Habits

Jacket copy is never going to be “perfect.” It’ll never capture everything you want readers to know about your book or your achievements as an author. So give up on trying to pack it all in and just accept the fact that this is supposed to be, much like the descriptions on a menu, a teaser. First throw your hands in the air, and then use them to karate chop all the extraneous elements into submission. What’s left over will be in fighting trim.

Would you like to be much more productive as a writer? It’s possible, and you don’t have to turn into a machine or ingest huge amounts of caffeine to do it. (Although a bit of coffee might help goose your enthusiasm.) If you’re like me, you wouldn’t mind increasing your writing output so you can get more books and information products to market. This aspiration naturally leads to the question, “How much content can I reasonably expect to produce?” The best way to quantify it is to find out how many words you actually crank out per hour.

Great content. Good timing. That's the key to successful social media marketing in a nutshell. But quality content and appropriate timing look different on every social media platform. To help you keep all the details of your social strategy straight, here's an infographic from Business 2 Community about WHAT, WHEN, and HOW OFTEN to post to the 9 most popular social media sites.

According to the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut, the shapes of stories can be graphed. Have you thought about the shape of your short story?

The most helpful bit of editing advice I ever got was from poet Michele Glazer. She said, "revision IS writing." In other words, there's no difference between the "writing" process and the editing process. You don't just write a draft, make some changes, correct the spelling, and call it good. As a writer, you need to be open to new ideas that may occur during the revision process, and be brave enough to follow them  — thus, leading you back into a writing mode. See? Revision IS writing, so it's best to just accept that fact upfront.

NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is just around the corner. Authors all over the US will attempt to complete a 50k-word novel by the end of November. Crazy? Maybe—but it also might be just what the doctor ordered. Arbitrary deadlines and a sense of camaraderie with other writers may give someone the nudge they need to get started writing the next great American novel. By combining ambitious goals with a sense of fun, NaNoWriMo helps foster an atmosphere that is conducive to creating quantity AND quality. But that doesn't mean you won't have to call upon your inner resources (discipline, drive, determination—aren't those all the same thing?) in order to get things done!