by Noelle Sterne
October 2016
If you believe you must wait to write until the right mood strikes, you’ll never get much done. Many writers nevertheless believe in this myth, supporting it with impressive rationales. Some blame external circumstances:
“I can only write in the cold weather—it’s so invigorating!”
“I can only write in the spring. The warm breeze caresses my forehead and fingers, and I melt into the keyboard.”
by Noelle Sterne
December 2015
Especially on dark and blocked days, I question why I write. Like other writers, at such depressive times I come up with a lot of reasons that seem extremely justified. Here are four gloomy statements you may blushingly recognize that I’ve repeated and have often heard from writing colleagues. With these seemingly unyielding pronouncements, though, I offer equally reasonable remedies, persuasions, and arguments that may just save us all.
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September 2015
At least twenty years after their appearance in pop (or intelligentsia) culture, I discovered memes. Richard Brodie’s seminal book The Virus of the Mind, despite its rather intentionally sensational title, is the study of the meme. He gives appropriate credit to the word’s originator, Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins (in The Selfish Gene, 1976).
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May 2015
You meticulously study the publication’s guidelines. You follow them precisely. You draft and redraft your submission. But . . . the rejections pour in relentlessly. You moan, scream, swear, and fling around the house, ready to throw in the sponge and throw out your keyboard.
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August 2014
Football, and especially last season’s crowning game, Super Bowl XLVIII, may be only a chilly memory as the summer baseball season swings forward. At Super Bowl, chain beers drowned football fans’ shock at the performance of the disappointing Denver Broncos and their star Man Peyton Manning. Fans’ whining about the boring score that kept the Seattle Seahawks piling on the points to 43 and the Broncos unbelievably paralyzed at 8 have faded into reruns of greater games.
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June 2014
We’ve all heard the venerable advice: to learn our craft and hone our skills, read, read, read. Granted, when we first start writing, reading other writers’ work can show us many approaches and techniques, enlarge our sense of unthinkable subjects, and give us models for daring to write what’s burning in us.
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March 2014
With WordPress and other DIY websites becoming ever easier, many writers are savvy enough to design and post their own sites. But some of us aren’t, or can’t face trekking up the learning curve. When I needed a website for publication of my book Trust Your Life: Forgive Yourself and Go After Your Dreams, I didn’t want a prepackaged site (a la WordPress), although they can be fine. But I needed a site that reflected the themes of my book and so resolved to hire a web designer.
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May 2013
What Kind of Writer?
I didn’t start out to be a self-help writer. My first love was poetry, and I actually published a handful of poems. Then I ventured into fiction, with a few more acceptances. Nonfiction, and especially self-help writing, was the farthest thing from my mind and computer.
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Every writer needs an elevator pitch. This is not an esoteric baseball term but a short, punchy statement about your work. You can deliver your pitch not only on an elevator but on the Starbucks, supermarket, or close-out sale line or anywhere else a conversation starts. You need the pitch, especially after you’ve announced you’re a writer to the person next to you and you hear that dread question, “And what do you write?”
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