Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

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Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach episodes

January 01, 2020 Ep 217: How to Gather Momentum When Your Writing's at a Standstill
[Ep 217]
I don’t know much about science, but I'm pretty sure Newton’s First Law goes like this: an object at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.1
Okay, I looked it up for accuracy. And I believe it applies not just to physics, but to my writing life, as well.
Over the holiday season, I myself did not come to rest, as I was busy baking, cooking, cleaning, wrapping gifts, hosting family. However, this focus on festivities brought my writing to a standstill.
My projects stalled out. I felt stuck. Inertia set in so that even after the tree returned to the attic and the lights came down, my creative efforts went nowhere. Something inside resisted my efforts to start writing again.
Until today, my writing had not budged.
Writing at rest stays at rest unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.
If I want to get my writing in motion and gather momentum, I have to take action.
And I thought I might not be the only one facing inertia and hoping for momentum in the new year, so here are some strategies to rev up the engines and get our words moving again.
1. Start reading, no matter what
Commit to reading, no matter what. I didn't write much in December, but I did read.
I listened to an audiobook while driving and exercising. I read short pieces while in between other tasks. That input kept me thinking and gathering ideas and images.
I recommend reading anything that catches your eye: poems, short stories, clever tweets, the side of the cereal box.
And as you read, take notes. Sentences that sing? Write them out. Style that inspires? Study and learn. Ideas that lead to deeper thoughts? Capture them in a notebook.
These concepts may connect to other tidbits tumbling inside of you. At some point, creativity begins to flow—words, in motion, pour onto the page, as enough material converges and convinces you that it's time to express it in your own words.
2. Start writing, no matter what
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” — Louis L’Amour2
It sounds so basic, so obvious, but our writing will remain at rest until we start writing. The act of writing is the force needed to get our writing in motion.
Freewriting can help, setting that timer and writing for ten, fifteen, or twenty minutes without stopping, even if you write, “I don’t know what to write about” ten times in a row.
Eventually, hopefully, our brains will get bored and pluck an image or idea from our mental storage vaults—perhaps something gleaned from reading—and at the end of a session, we’ll end up with a few promising sentences.
Even if we don’t, when we start writing, no matter what, we train our brains and hands to work together so they remember how to put words down on the page.
3. Set a deadline and meet it, no matter what
Is someone waiting for a project you've promised? Are you committed to turning in your work on a certain date? Lucky you! External deadlines spur us on, so let that force you to the computer or notebook so that you absolutely must slam out words and turn in your project on time.
Many of us work for ourselves, in essence, publishing on our websites and on social media. No editor awaits our submission. Though we may have readers wondering why we’ve fallen silent, we don’t have external motivation. We may need to trick ourselves into meeting a deadline.
Editorial calendars can help with this. Set a hard deadline. Tell a group of people when something is going to be released.
Then make it happen, no matter what. That can get our writing in motion.
4. Trust in revision
Maybe you're putting off a project despite the dead...
7 min
December 05, 2019 Ep 216: An Easy Structure for Your Chaotic Work in Progress
You've researched your topic, taken copious notes, created a mind map, made lists, but you haven't settled on the best way to organize all of your material. You aren't sure how to structure your chaotic work in progress.
Perhaps you’ve tried the ready-made outlines I've proposed—past-present-future, and problem-solution or problem-solution-benefits—but those didn’t fit this project.
Well, here's another: zoom in or zoom out.
Could that work?
The Zoom In/Zoom Out Outline
This ready-made outline is pretty straightforward. You pick a starting point for your topic and from there, you zoom in or out.
If you start big and broad, you can progressively zoom in on the topic so the analysis or story ends with a narrow, focused perspective or impact.
If you start at a smaller point, you gradually zoom out to offer a broader application or conclusion.
Example: Zoom In
Let’s say you want to analyze an issue that concerns you—an opinion piece about civility.
You can start at a high level, offering a broad analysis of how the nation is shifting its behavior and language so that cultural norms related to civility have shifted—your stance is that the United States as a whole is losing something important as it moves away from civility as an unspoken value. You cite studies and quote experts.
Then you zoom in to make observations at the local level based on a recent news event that happened in your city. You quote law enforcement or religious leaders who claim they’ve seen a change over the past decade in how people treat one another at public events and gatherings.
Finally, you zoom in to challenge readers to consider the degree to which they themselves have changed and if their behavior and speech reflects the level of civility they’d like to see in themselves and others.
Example: Zoom Out
Of course, this structure is easily reversed. You can start small and zoom out.
You may have seen the TED Talk “For more wonder, rewild the world.” In this talk, George Monbiot explains “trophic cascades.” A trophic cascade, he says, is “an ecological process that starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way to the bottom.”
You can see how this subject matter lends itself to a zoom structure, especially the classic example he uses to illustrate his point. I’m thinking of it as zooming out.
He talks about how wolves had been absent from Yellowstone National Park for over 70 years. During that time, herds of deer built up because they lacked a predator, and they grew to increasingly large numbers and grazed down much of the native vegetation.
Then a few wolves were introduced to the park. Monbiot begins his structure here, I think, as he starts with the wolves. After establishing context, he directs our attention to those few wolves as a narrow, focused starting point.
The wolves killed some of the deer, of course, but they also changed the behavior of the herds so that they grazed in new locations, allowing vegetation to mature in valleys that then “regenerated.” Monbiot zooms out and describes the changes: trees grew, birds returned, beavers increased and built dams where more species could grow.
Monbiot keeps going with his presentation, citing one change after another that led to more and more areas of the park transforming. He zoomed out, eventually zooming out far enough to consider the rivers, claiming they changed course due to these impacts.
Starting small, with those few wolves, he zooms out all the way to the rivers, so we can celebrate the rejuvenated, rewilded national park.
Try This Outline On Your Work in Progress
Whichever direction you zoom, this structure offers a simple way to experiment with your ...
6 min
November 06, 2019 Try This Classic Structure for Your Next Nonfiction Writing Project
Organization is a challenge for writers. You may have strong ideas, feel confident with grammar, and write in a fun style.
But putting it all together in a structure that makes sense? That can be hard.
There’s no one perfect way to structure most projects. You have options.
Some people find this liberating. They enjoy exploring countless options and settle naturally into an order that makes sense for their content.
Other writers find this overwhelming. They’d like to be told, "If you’re writing THIS, you always use THAT structure."
Without structure, those writers get stuck.
Structure Brings Order and Clarity
In fact, I’ve met with writers who have been stuck for weeks, months...occasionally for years. All because they didn’t know how to structure their project.
Without structure, they didn’t know how to order and organize their ideas, so writing itself felt confusing. They simply shoved it aside, unclear what to do next.
Structure brings order and clarity to the writer.
And structure brings order and clarity to the reader.
Structure for Poets
Some writing offers built-in structure.
If you’re a poet, for example, you can turn to form poetry to find structure built into the assignment. So many kinds of poems follow a form or a pattern, like a sestina, sonnet, and a rondelet. They each come with rules, rhythms, and rhyme schemes. While challenging, these limits offer structure that a poet who works in free verse lacks.
Structure for Novelists
Novelists can turn to structure that works well for fiction, such as the hero’s journey. The author doesn’t have to include the obligatory scenes, but many genres work well when the author hits those beats, moments, or scenes a reader has come to expect.
Structure for Nonfiction Writers
Nonfiction writers may face the blank page with no idea where to start. Or they spit out their ideas with no clue how to arrange them to create an order that flows well for the reader.
Writers who compose essays, articles, books know they have a problem to solve: they need structure.
And they may struggle with structure due to lack of resources. Maybe no one has pointed out to them structure options. Or maybe they struggle to remain objective with their own material to see how it would best flow.
They may have tried methods they’ve learned over the years and those have gotten them only so far.
Mind Maps Don't Automatically Lead to Structure
For instance, maybe they tried a mind map. And that helped them spit out the main ideas they want to cover in their book. But all those circles spread out like a web on the paper don’t themselves reveal a solid structure—they just reveal a number of possible starting points and all their subpoints. So the mind map may have served to pull out of the writer content ideas, but the map itself didn’t result in a clear structure.
Traditional Outlines Don't Automatically Lead to Structure
The writer of nonfiction may have reverted to the I, II, III, and A, B, C format they remembered from their youth, with those Roman numerals leading the eye down the page with indented A, B, C items underneath. Under those lines came the numbers 1, 2, 3, then lowercase a, b, c, followed by the little “i’s” with one “i” then two “ii’s” and “iii’s” that created those miniature Roman numerals, leading up to “iv’s” and “v’s.”
The poor writer may spend more time fretting over those little “i’s” than they do crafting content. So knowing how to type up a list with Roman numerals again doesn’t in and of itself reveal a structure.
Even organized, sequential-types who love to line up papers and numbers and files and books on shelves can create a per...
16 min
October 10, 2019 Ep 214: Are Outlines a Writer’s Greatest Gift...or Curse?
[Ep 214]
Back in July I bought a Garmin watch that tracks steps and heart rate. More importantly, it offers training plans for beginning and intermediate runners. I clicked on a beginner’s plan because I hadn’t run regularly for years, and started following the instructions each day.
Now, I tend to wing things in general. More often than not, I jump in and make decisions on the fly with just about everything. I like freedom and hate being fenced in or forced to do things. Too much structure and I’m ready to bust out the walls.
But for some reason, I responded well to the structure of this training program. If it told me to do intervals, I’d head down the road and run intervals. If it said to run hills, I found the hilliest hills in the mostly flat city where I live.
I enjoyed the choices within the parameters of the plan. I could choose where to run and I could choose to skip a stage of the plan. But I loved how the plan organized my workouts so I don’t have to stand at the end of my driveway trying to figure out what to do each day, inventing from scratch.
So while my personality might be the type to look at structure as a curse, I think it might be...a gift.
A Writer’s Gift
Outlines are to a writer what a Garmin training plan is to a runner: a gift, not a curse.
During the years when I taught composition to high school students, the most naturally creative students resisted outlines. They hated the idea of slamming structure into what could be an organic process of discovery. And I sympathized with them—that’s how I tend to feel.
So some of them they respectfully requested that they try it their way. But because I was teaching composition, I had to teach outlines. And because this was a group of compliant homeschoolers, they did it my way.
Even the student who participated in NaNoWriMo every year as a pantser—flying by the seat of her pants as she completed a novel in the month of November with very little structure—even she agreed to outline for the big research paper assigned for the second semester.
When they finished researching and their outlines shifted based on new information they gleaned, they sorted their 3x5 cards into the outline and even the biggest doubters who thought outlining was annoying and a curse found it was a brilliant time-saver. With ease and speed and efficiency, they wrote organized drafts that reflected a logical structure and flow.
Even my NaNoWriMo student conceded that the outline-approach worked. She said in the future she would likely drop the step of taking notes on 3x5 cards, but the outline would be part of her writing life—at least for academic papers.
While I don’t spend as much time discussing the art of fiction, I’ve seen plenty of general outlines that a novelist could use to give a general form and remind the writer of key elements and beats to hit along the way.
We don’t have to use outlines, but they can provide a starting point. They offer structure and support as we brainstorm and produce our first draft. And they help us write faster than ever.
Isn’t that a gift?
Impromptu Outlines
My son participates In a speech and debate club where I serve as a parent-volunteer. Another mom teaches various speaking principles and the past few weeks we’ve reviewed how to outline a platform speech.
But she also presents a series of outlines to the students that they can use in their impromptu speeches.
Impromptu speeches are not planned in advance. The competitor enters a room, selects a piece of paper listing two topics, and in two minutes, plans a five-minute speech based on one of the two topics.
You can imagine how the student’s mind reacts to this pressure. It can go blank.
11 min
September 19, 2019 Ep 213: How to Hook and Hold Your Readers
[Ep 213]
If you didn’t click to read this first sentence, I failed.
If we want to hook readers and hold their attention so they read all the way to the end, we have to generate an intriguing title or headline.
Lure Readers with Your Title
Books, chapters, articles, essays, poems: they all need names or titles that invite the reader to stop skimming and scrolling and think, “Hm. I wonder what this is about?” or “Oh, wow, I need this information.”
I opened up Feedly when I was preparing this article and stopped on an article at The Write Practice titled “How to Find the Core Message of Your Writing” because it was clear and seemed relevant to the kinds of things I like to read.
But I also stopped on an article by Emily P. Freeman: “How to Find (and Become) A Good Listener.” That sounded useful to help me as a coach and to help me improve relationships with family and friends.
Or consider James Clear’s book Atomic Habits. The main title intrigues me with that word “atomic” connected to “habits.” His subtitle is “An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones.” Then he includes a tagline that clarifies it further: “Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results.” That sounds like a doable approach to the topic of habits, doesn’t it? He hooked me with his title and subtitle combo.
We have to entice our readers to click on the link or open the book by capturing that first concept in a few words that hint at or outright reveal the subject, topic, theme, or problem we’ll address in the piece.
Hook Your Readers with Attention Grabbers
Let’s say you nailed it—you lured in your readers with the headline.
Now it’s time to hook them—to grab them by the throat, as novelists often say. Bring on the attention grabber: it’s that first line or two that will keep them reading.
When I taught composition to high school students, I’d offer attention-grabber ideas like:
a startling statistic
a quote
a question
an intriguing statement or claim
a story (e.g., an anecdote that stands alone, a personal story, or someone else’s story)
That article about finding the core message of your writing starts, “Why do you write?”—a question any writer will instinctively answer, at least in his head.
So the author, Joe Bunting, has probably hooked us. Our mind is engaged with the question. It’s a good attention-grabber.
Emily P. Freeman’s article on finding and becoming a good listener has an epigraph—a quote from Dr. Larry Crabb about listening to each other—followed by the beginning of the actual article. She starts with a story:
It’s 2012, and there’s a stack of brochures in the little room I type in. I keep staring over at them, rereading their invitation, “To know more about you: If you would like to be informed of upcoming events…”
I reach over, and I turn the plastic holder to face the wall. I cannot keep reading that same brochure over and over again.
What’s going to happen? Why is this brochure featured so prominently in this story? Is she going to take action? Is it going to change her? What does this brochure have to do with listening?
You can see how stories are great for hooking readers—they’re great attention-grabbers. They awaken curiosity and open a loop that we must close. We want to know what happens and how it ends.
So Emily has hooked me.
You, too, can use stories. And here’s a bonus tip—if you start far enough into a situation, the action of a story engages and hooks the reader, but you can leave it hanging so that you complete the story in the conclusion. That provides closure that satisfies and gratifies the reader. It feels like you’ve come full circle.
But for them to get to the end,
14 min
August 27, 2019 Ep 212: Productive Writers Build Their Body of Work – Pillar Three
[Ep 212]
For about four years, I didn’t do much to get healthy or stay healthy. I’d talk about getting in shape but wouldn’t actually do anything. I’d wake up and think about it, then roll over and go back to sleep.
It’s no surprise, of course, that the idea of exercising—the thought of it—didn’t strengthen a single muscle in my body. The desire to be healthy, no matter how intense, didn’t actually make me healthy.
I had to take action.
Finally, about a year ago, I decided to do something. I started by jogging, plodding slowly through the neighborhood on a route so short I called it the wimpy route.
But that’s how it began. To start improving my health, I took action. It was humbling to start so small, but I got out there and ran—I mean, plodded—the wimpy route over and over.
And wouldn’t you know, action produced results.
Over time, I ran a tiny bit faster and farther and grew a tiny bit stronger and healthier. By continuing to take action, I continued to see results.
Productive Writers Take Action
If we want to be writers, we can’t just talk about writing and wish our projects into existence. The idea of writing—the thought of it—won’t get a single sentence of an article, blog post, poem, or short story composed. The desire to be a writer won’t actually make you a writer.
You have to decide to do something.
You have to take action.
That’s how it begins, no matter how humble or wimpy it may seem to you.
Productive Writers Write
In the beginning, it doesn’t have to be much. Just as I didn’t expect to be running a half-marathon distance when I first started plodding around the wimpy route, we don’t have to complete a 200-page novel in our first efforts to sit at our computers and write.
We can tap out a few sentences; maybe a paragraph or two. With those humble beginnings, it begins. And over time it adds up.
That’s the foundation of a productive writer.
A productive writer writes.
Productivity Doesn’t Mean Assembly-Line Production
Productivity doesn’t mean we have to spit out poems like candy from a vending machine or roll out blog articles like cars on an assembly line with repetition and precision. After all, that can lead to a loss of creativity and originality.
What productivity does mean is we have to start and complete projects instead of falling down rabbit holes of research for weeks on end or avoiding the work out of fear or perfectionism.
Productive writers finally step away from the search engines and library books and throw some of their discoveries onto the page to sort it out and produce a final project.
Productive writers overcome perfectionism and fear by sitting down and tapping out their thoughts to create a rough draft, no matter how rough.
Priscilla Long, author of The Portable Writer’s Mentor, writes, “In the end what matters to the ambitious dreamer is a steady and even rather plodding stream of work.”1 It’s fine, she says, if much of the output is “rough, awkward, contrived, and arguably awful.”2
That’s part of becoming a productive writer. You regularly produce a “plodding stream of work” no matter how “arguably awful” it emerges. Through the act of writing, you’re discovering your voice, your style, your preferred genre, your message.
You’re figuring out how to write and what to write every time you write. It’s building a kind of creative strength in you, as you overcome Resistance and do the work.
Productive Writers Finish
Eventually, after establishing a system of producing words and rough drafts, productive writers will develop a habit of finishing what they start.
So often, writers start project after project in bursts of creative inspiration but struggle to see even one of them through to completion.
Not everything we produce will be publishable, but we have to start and finish projects to build our body of work.
Productive Writers Set Up Systems
To be effective at starting and finishing,
13 min
August 27, 2019 Ep 212: Productive Writers Build Their Body of Work - Pillar Three
[Ep 212]
For about four years, I didn’t do much to get healthy or stay healthy. I’d talk about getting in shape but wouldn’t actually do anything. I’d wake up and think about it, then roll over and go back to sleep.
It’s no surprise, of course, that the idea of exercising—the thought of it—didn’t strengthen a single muscle in my body. The desire to be healthy, no matter how intense, didn’t actually make me healthy.
I had to take action.
Finally, about a year ago, I decided to do something. I started by jogging, plodding slowly through the neighborhood on a route so short I called it the wimpy route.
But that’s how it began. To start improving my health, I took action. It was humbling to start so small, but I got out there and ran—I mean, plodded—the wimpy route over and over.
And wouldn’t you know, action produced results.
Over time, I ran a tiny bit faster and farther and grew a tiny bit stronger and healthier. By continuing to take action, I continued to see results.
Productive Writers Take Action
If we want to be writers, we can’t just talk about writing and wish our projects into existence. The idea of writing—the thought of it—won’t get a single sentence of an article, blog post, poem, or short story composed. The desire to be a writer won’t actually make you a writer.
You have to decide to do something.
You have to take action.
That’s how it begins, no matter how humble or wimpy it may seem to you.
Productive Writers Write
In the beginning, it doesn’t have to be much. Just as I didn’t expect to be running a half-marathon distance when I first started plodding around the wimpy route, we don’t have to complete a 200-page novel in our first efforts to sit at our computers and write.
We can tap out a few sentences; maybe a paragraph or two. With those humble beginnings, it begins. And over time it adds up.
That’s the foundation of a productive writer.
A productive writer writes.
Productivity Doesn’t Mean Assembly-Line Production
Productivity doesn’t mean we have to spit out poems like candy from a vending machine or roll out blog articles like cars on an assembly line with repetition and precision. After all, that can lead to a loss of creativity and originality.
What productivity does mean is we have to start and complete projects instead of falling down rabbit holes of research for weeks on end or avoiding the work out of fear or perfectionism.
Productive writers finally step away from the search engines and library books and throw some of their discoveries onto the page to sort it out and produce a final project.
Productive writers overcome perfectionism and fear by sitting down and tapping out their thoughts to create a rough draft, no matter how rough.
Priscilla Long, author of The Portable Writer’s Mentor, writes, “In the end what matters to the ambitious dreamer is a steady and even rather plodding stream of work.”1 It’s fine, she says, if much of the output is “rough, awkward, contrived, and arguably awful.”2
That’s part of becoming a productive writer. You regularly produce a “plodding stream of work” no matter how “arguably awful” it emerges. Through the act of writing, you’re discovering your voice, your style, your preferred genre, your message.
You’re figuring out how to write and what to write every time you write. It’s building a kind of creative strength in you, as you overcome Resistance and do the work.
Productive Writers Finish
Eventually, after establishing a system of producing words and rough drafts, productive writers will develop a habit of finishing what they start.
So often,
13 min
August 22, 2019 Ep 211: Be More Creative to Enjoy Your Best Writing Life: Pillar Two
[Ep 211]
Creativity as a pillar of the writing life? It’s a no-brainer. Creativity and writing go together like pencil and paper.
Writers practice creativity each and every day.
But when we think about creative writing and a creative writer, our minds may turn toward MFA programs. After all, that’s where you study creative writing.
I hate the potential implication—that other kinds of writing are not creative.
Who's a Creative Writer?
Creative writing instructors and programs offer teaching and training that nudge students toward an approach—a mindset and practice—different from that of writers who focus more on, say, blogging or marketing. Certainly MFA students gain skills that prepare them for a rewarding, challenging writing life—one that matches their goals to write and produce literary work.
But I believe those who write corporate brochures and articles about succulents are also creative writers, even if they didn’t graduate with an MFA or land their work in respected literary journals. Bloggers and copywriters can also practice a rewarding, challenging creative writing life that matches their goals.
When you write, you’re creating.
If you write, you create.
Thus, creativity is a pillar of the writing life.
On the flip side, all writers—even published authors who have completed MFA programs—are capable of producing somewhat stagnant, occasionally derivative, work.
We don’t want that.
So how can any writer—all writers—practice creativity? How can we be more creative to enjoy our best writing lives?
Entire books have been written about the topic, so I can’t tackle everything. But here are a few thoughts to get us started.
What Is Creativity?
First, it might help to establish a definition of creativity, but that’s harder than you might think.
Researchers and experts and writers have been trying to pin it down, and no one seems to agree. I haven’t located one single definition (unless we would turn to Merriam-Webster). What I’ve spotted are words and phrases tossed around that we can consider:
originality (this comes up a lot)
surprise (which we talked about regarding curiosity)
authenticity (important for writers to practice)
discovery (including making connections)1
Whether these words reflect the process of creating or the finished product itself—that is, the thing created—they give us a hint of what it means to be creative: what it means to create.
Learning from Other Creatives
I’ve written before of how we can learn from the greats, studying writers we admire, even copying passages to learn techniques. We may find inspiration in their creative process and integrate elements into our own space and our own routines.
But why limit ourselves to learning from other writers? We may work in the world of words, but we can learn from other domains:
Writers can learn from the creativity of scientists to continually ask questions, experiment, dig deeper, analyze, draw conclusions, and try again.
Writers can learn from visual artists how color, form, and texture engage the senses and drive decisions.
Writers can learn from actors how working with the constraints of the stage and the script, we can make numerous choices that affect a performance and its effect on the audience.
Julia Cameron’s Artist Dates encourage outings to step out of our writing hovels and step into other spaces, whether a museum or yarn shop, an antique emporium or international grocery store.
From this new set of sensations and input, we build a network of possible connections, with one idea linking to another and another to form a new,
10 min
August 06, 2019 Ep 210: Cultivate Curiosity for Your Best Writing Life, Pillar One
[210]
Dani Shapiro writes, “When I think of the wisest people I know, they share one defining trait: curiosity” (213, Still Writing).
As she notes this connection between wisdom and curiosity, she continues, “They turn away from the minutiae of their lives—and focus on the world around them. They are motivated by a desire to explore the unfamiliar. They are drawn toward what they don't understand. They enjoy surprise” (213).
I love how she connects surprise and curiosity. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi makes that same connection, as you’ll see shortly.
But before we get to that, let me establish my own connection: that curiosity is one of three pillars of your best writing life...along with creativity and productivity.
Curious Writers Bring More to Their Work
As curiosity becomes a daily practice, our writing will benefit, because curiosity serves as a driving force to producing captivating content and developing a writer who has things to say.
Nourish curiosity and you’ll have a lively imagination drawing from a vast and ever-expanding library of ideas. Each day, even the smallest flash of wonder fans the flame of creativity.
If we agree with Dani Shapiro that curious people focus on the world around them with a desire to explore the unfamiliar—drawn toward what they don’t understand—we gather clues for how we, too, can cultivate curiosity to live out our best writing life.
If you’ve lost your sense of wonder and dampened curiosity, don’t worry. You can recapture it, funneling into your work a newfound delight in the world around you, in yourself, and in others.
If you happen to be by nature a curious lifelong learner, lucky you! Continue to explore new ways to cultivate it further to become even more curious and pour what you discover into your writing projects.
Develop Curiosity
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his book Creativity writes:
“[T]he first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interests, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake…. Creative individuals are childlike in that their curiosity remains fresh even at ninety years of age; they delight in the strange and the unknown. And because there is no end to the unknown, their delight also is endless.” (346, Creativity)
Did you hear his suggestions?
Allocate “attention to things for their own sake.”
“Delight in the strange and unknown.”
It’s similar to what Dani Shapiro was saying: even the old in age are young at heart as they “explore the unfamiliar” and let themselves be “drawn toward what they don’t understand.”
Curious people learn something new every day.
Search, Capture, Ask
My mom moved from the American Midwest to a coastal town in the South and became captivated by the flora and fauna of the area.
She bought a telephoto lens so she could capture photos of the birds that seem so exotic to her. She grew up and lived most of her life with mourning doves, cardinals, robins, starlings, swallows, and red-winged blackbirds.
Now she’s delighting in what are, for her, “strange and unknown” species. She’s “exploring the unfamiliar” as she snaps photos and looks up in a guidebook the names of birds that turn out to be wood storks, ibises, great blue herons, green herons, and anhingas.
She shares them with her Facebook followers posting one photo after another along with thoughtful captions further modeling this curiosity that comes so naturally to her.
My mom is by nature curious and developed it as a journalist, rooting out stories everywhere she goes.
But you don’t need to be a trained journalist to ask the questions popping into your head and to search for answers:
14 min
July 30, 2019 Ep 209: Curiosity, Creativity, Productivity: Three Pillars to Building Your Best Writing Life
[Ep 209]
Each week I claim that writers are discovering ways to reach their writing goals—and have fun—by being more curious, creative, and productive.
And each week you may be thinking, “Really?”
Yes, I really do believe these three traits or these three values can drive you forward to achieve your goals—and have fun along the way. They are values I myself take to heart and encourage my clients to explore and embrace, because curiosity, creativity, and productivity—together—have the potential to transform both you and your writing.
Today’s overview will give you a high-level look, and in the weeks ahead we’ll drill down into each one, to look at their core. By taking a closer look, you’ll see how developing these traits as a part of everyday life and as part of your writing practice, you’ll position yourself to become the writer you want to be.
Pillar One: Curiosity in the Writing Life
Why curiosity on its own? Why not tuck that under the umbrella of creativity?
Curiosity drives us to discover, to wonder, to think “What if?”
Could there be a more energizing trait for a writer?
Writers of fiction turn to the “what if” prompt to ignite their imagination. Curiosity propels stories forward for the reader as they wonder what’s next. Curiosity gets characters into trouble and then curiosity helps them solve problems to get out of trouble.
Poets, too, benefit from curiosity as a driving force. As the poet asks questions, she looks more closely at anything from a fish to a father. Curiosity calls us to slow down, consider, put the pieces together in a way that the rest of the world, speeding along without a pause, rarely has time to mess with—and curious poets put words to what they’ve pieced together.
Writers of nonfiction who let curiosity guide them will break free from rephrasing the same old points over and over. A curious writer will dig deeper, probe into subject matter, research topics to find the freshest, most accurate answers.
Writers who value and practice this as a part of their daily lives will likely have more fun along the way, delighting in both big wonders and small, grieving over deep injustice, seeking truth and revealing it.
In the next episode, we’ll look in more detail about how to develop curiosity as a writer and practice it regularly. Let’s look briefly at the next pillar of the writing life: creativity.
Pillar Two: Creativity in the Writing Life
You can enroll in an MFA program to earn a degree in what? Creative writing.
Whatever focus you select—fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction—creativity is the core concept of the program because creativity is core to a writer.
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone disagree with the belief that creativity is key to great writing, and yet I’ve read pieces that could use an injection of creativity. Aren’t we seeking to create something new rather than regurgitate something old and stale in a style that sounds like it could have been written by anyone?
Embedded in the idea of creativity is not only that the ideas are creative—they’re fresh, novel, compelling, engaging—but also that we are indeed creating things. We can’t make something out of nothing, but we can mold into existence a passage, a poem, a project from ideas formed out of words. In that sense, writers are creators.
Practicing the craft of writing builds our confidence in wielding the tools at our disposal, but we can practice creativity in other areas of life in a way that enriches us as people. That, in turn, feeds into our work.
Be more creative as a person, and you’ll move closer to becoming a more creative writer—and thus achieving your writing goals.
9 min

About Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

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With Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, you'll gain clarity and overcome hurdles to become a better writer, pursue publishing, and reach your writing goals. Ann provides practical tips and motivation for…