Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

Latest Episodes:

#62: When You’re Not the Writer You Want to Be Aug 02, 2016

Show notes

You’ve been thinking about a project, trying out beginnings, thinking through images. In your mind, this book, short story, essay, or poem is evolving into something brilliant—something shimmering like stained glass, light streaming through the colors, gleaming, perfect, like the rose window in Notre Dame. Ann Patchett talks about this phenomenon, how that stunning masterpiece […]

#61: Why Writers Should Be Curious About People Jul 26, 2016

Show notes

Years ago I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and found one of the most useful principles from the book was this: Become genuinely interested in other people. Carnegie would meet people at a gathering or party and get them talking about their hobbies and areas of expertise. By being genuinely interested in them—by being curious—he met interesting people, learned a lot, and gathered a wealth of material for his books and lectures. He inserted a story in that chapter that every writer should probably hear. Carnegie said: I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. "If the author doesn’t like people," he said, "people won’t like his or her stories." This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching a sermon. "I am telling you," he said, "the same things your preacher would tell you, but remember, you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories." (68) You have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories. Maybe you’d like to be interested in people but you’re shy. Maybe you’re an introvert. Maybe you hate to be in the spotlight. That describes a lot of writers. If that’s you, you may find it hard to be curious about people and ask them questions. But it’s a skill you can practice by learning to ask questions and listening. Once you do, you’ll not only begin to gather material and inspiration—you’ll enjoy a side benefit of getting the focus off yourself. Once you ask a couple of open-ended questions that get the other person talking, you won’t have to say much more about yourself, which is handy for the shy or introverted person. People will love to tell you about their woodworking hobby, or their recent vacation to Spain, or their daughter’s prize-winning pie at the state fair. Being curious about people is also an excellent way to understand people who come from a completely different walk of life or have views that are opposite of yours. Respectfully ask curious questions, listening without the intent to argue or jump in with your own stories, and you may learn how someone ended up with a certain religious belief or political stance and gain deeper understanding about something you’d only barely been exposed to. Novelists can write more complex characters when they understand more about where real people have come from or why they’ve developed an interest in an uncommon topic or activity. As you meet people and show interest, you don’t want to use them, but you can sort of think of conversations as research. Someone could spark an idea for an essay when she mentions a restaurant that shut down where her mom and dad met in the 1960s. A person at the laundromat might tell a story about his great uncle who served in World War II, and that sparks the idea for a character in your next short story. Carnegie talks about showing genuine interest in people as a practice for getting to know them through the stories they share when you ask about them. He claims you’ll develop real friendships, get people to like you, and tell better stories because you like people and take a genuine interest in them. You’ll tell better stories. You’ll tell better stories because you’ll have lots of them, collecting stories from every person you meet. And you’ll tell better stories because you’ll likely develop excellent storytelling skills from people simply by listening to stories told.

#60: The Top 5 Ways Curiosity Can Ruin Your Writing Jul 19, 2016

Show notes

“Curiosity can ruin my writing? What? I thought Ann Kroeker lauded curiosity as a key component to the writing life! She claims it’s one way we can achieve our writing goals!” “Is she turning her back on curiosity? Has it killed the cat and now she’s urging us to return to predictable poetry and lifeless prose?” No worries, friends. Curiosity still fuels my creativity. I’m still convinced that curious writers are generally more creative and productive, and able to achieve their writing goals—all while having fun! But every once in awhile, curiosity ruins my writing. And if you’re not careful, it can ruin yours. 1: Trouble with Curiosity about our Environment First, what happens when we give in to an insatiable curiosity about our environment? We think we’re sidetracked by interruptions and distractions, and those do exist and they can be the issue. But distractions alone aren’t always to blame. Sometimes what threatens my productivity or the depth of my ideas isn’t the distraction itself but my curiosity about the distraction. Even if someone else addresses the interruption and I didn’t have to lift a finger from the keyboard, curiosity wonders: Wait, who called? Who was that at the door? What’s that noise? I wonder who wrote that song? Hey, who’s he texting? Curiosity is behind that niggling feeling that asks: “I wonder if I should open that email now or if it can wait?” “Isn’t that my Words with Friends notification?” “Are there any chips left? I should check.” So it’s not only the distractions—it’s our curiosity about the distractions that can create disruption, which can ruin my writing, or at least my writing session. Try asking a question out loud about your project to distract from the distraction and bring yourself back to the work. It reminds your brain where to direct its attention, like, “What would make this section stronger?” Or, “What am I trying to say here about the topic?” It re-engages you with the work. 2: Trouble with Curiosity about Systems Another trouble area is a consuming curiosity about systems. This is like Shiny Object Syndrome. You’re curious to try a new organizational tool or productivity app, so you spend a few hours downloading it, messing around with it to understand how it works, then another hour moving all your information over to it, then it’s kind of slow because you’re still adapting, and just when you gain some momentum a week or a month later, you hear about another one and find yourself drawn to give it a try—Maybe it’ll work better than the last one?—and you go through the process all over again. Productivity experts will tell you this about these alluring systems: The best system is the one you actually use. Pick one. Commit. Don’t worry if Trello’s color scheme isn’t your favorite or Evernote’s tagging system feels a little cumbersome. If it’s working pretty well, stick with that. You’ll be able to get to your work much more effectively if you can curb your curiosity next time someone—even someone like me—entices you to try something else. You want to be able to find your notes and research, and that works best with something you use consistently. 3: Trouble with Curiosity During the Research Process That leads to number three: Curiosity is a friend to the research process...to a point. It can become a crutch and an excuse not to do the work of finally planning the piece and writing it. We research and research and research for a short story, novel, article, or essay, following interesting tidbits that branch out to more and more interesting tidbits driven by insatiable curiosity,

#59: Your Writing Can Change the World Jul 12, 2016

Show notes

Have you ever attempted the “I Am From” exercise? I’ll give you some links in the Resources section below to templates and lists you can use to write your own. In her book Writing to Change the World, Mary Pipher recommends this “I Am From” exercise as a way to know yourself, to explore identity issues by reflecting on food, places, people in your upbringing. You start to see what shaped you and formed your values and beliefs. If you use the template, you'll end up with a list poem. Mine turned out more like a short essay, because I took the liberty of composing more than one sentence in response to the prompts. Either way, I agree with Pipher that the process of digging up memories and images helped me better understand myself. This is what I wrote in 2011. Where I’m From I am from the persimmon tree, ripe fruit dropping, splitting, squishing soft into the grassy lawn below. I am from sweet-spring lilac and lily-of-the-valley. I am from clover and crown vetch, hollyhocks and honeysuckle, peonies and pansies. I am from soybean and corn fields, hay and straw, and Black Angus cattle grazing in the pond field. Our 30 acres held barn swallows, snapping turtles, red-winged blackbirds, and the lanky black-and-yellow garden spider poised in the center of a stringy orb made of dewy threads stretching from the flaking boards of the tool shed to the old red gas tank used to fuel the 8N tractor. I am from Dick and Lynn, editors who carried home the scent of newsprint and ink in their hair and clothes. Their book collection lined the walls of every room in the house, and I am from those classics, mysteries, westerns, and biographies. I am from my brother’s comic book and insect collections, “The Maple Leaf Rag” he played on the chipped keys of our family piano, and his Beatles albums that spun on the stereo console. Barbies and Breyer Horses, Operation and Life, Pong and Pacman; Scooby-Doo, Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch; I am from board games and early electronics, cartoons and sitcoms. I am from white diaries snapped shut with a metal lock and key; and I am from the library, curled in a corner with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. About a mile from home sits the tiny brick church with tall windows opened on hot summer Sundays to let the breeze blow across Mr. Bowman’s farm field and onto our sweat-glistened faces and necks. I stood among neighboring farmers holding worn hymnals, singing “In the Garden” and “Trust and Obey.” I am from those dark wooden pews and the coins and bills jangling in the offering plate. I am from the two-digit numbers slid into the display board listing the previous week’s attendance. Squeezed between my dad and brother on the bench seat of the old red GMC truck, straddling the stick shift mounted to the floor board, I rode to the Belleville diner for giant tenderloin sandwiches, all-you-can-eat catfish, or Beef Manhattan topped with mashed potatoes and gravy. Dad would sing sometimes, songs from his childhood, like “Indian Love Call,” imitating Jeanette MacDonald in a falsetto voice, and “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” encouraging us to join in the chorus. I am from track meets, softball games, and the woodwind section of the high school band. I am from the bedroom with yellow-flowered wallpaper and two windows overlooking the lilacs where a mockingbird perched to serenade. I am from Dairy Queen Dilly Bars and Dr Pepper chilled in a glass bottle. I am from simpler, slower times, riding barefoot down the tar and gravel country road to the creek on a banana seat blue Schwinn, wearing ponytails and secondhand T-shirts and shorts. I would wade into the creek and dig for clay to make coil pots that would dry in the sun. I would skip rocks and watch minnows the color of silt or moss slip past my ankles ...

#58: How to Affirm Your Own Writing Life Jul 06, 2016

Show notes

Some days, you wake up and feel like you can finish a novel in a month—and it’s not even November, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! Or you feel so on fire you could pitch and land an essay in The Paris Review and The New Yorker. Then there are the other days. On those days, you might have […]

#57: Go Ahead and Play to Your Strengths Jun 29, 2016

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If you want to expand your reach, gain new skills, stretch yourself and take your writing to the next level, you can dance at the edge of your comfort zone—that place where we have to push ourselves just a little bit to try something new that we’ve been talking about for years. At the edge […]

#56: To Learn How to Write, You Have to Write Jun 22, 2016

Show notes

Writers become writers because they read something that made them want to pick up a pen or open a laptop and do the same thing. They read some piece of literature that inspired. Did that happen to you? Maybe when you were young? Maybe last week? You opened a book and thought: This novel makes me want to tell a story, too, with characters as vibrant as these and scenes just as stunning. Or you clicked through to an online magazine and sighed: This essay gets me thinking in new directions. I want to explore things at this level, too. I want to help readers read, think, learn, and question. Or you turned the page of a literary journal and sank into the stanzas of a new poem: It has everything I love in it. I, too, want to work with images and metaphor, rhythm and rhyme. So you go to your computer ready to try your hand at the craft. You can’t wait—your mind is brimming with your own ideas and phrases. You open a new document and you start writing, and 500 or a thousand words later, you stop. You look out the window for a minute, maybe go to the kitchen and get a sandwich, make some tea, then you come back to the screen and read what you just wrote. You finish reading and see that cursor at the end of your last line, blinking, like a wicked wink, mocking you, as if to say, What were you thinking? You can’t produce at that level and you never will. And then, next time you read something in a magazine or at a website you admire, or you open a book or that literary journal, and ponder the poem or essay or novel...instead of inspiring you, it intimidates, and you think, Man, my work will never sound like this. I mean, I want it to. But I tried. And it doesn’t sound like that. Not at all. And you start to question: Should I keep at this? Or am I doomed to mediocrity? Might as well slam that laptop shut. Leave the real writing to the experts, the ones who’ve been at this game longer than I have and have the real training—the ones who have arrived. Yeah. What were you thinking? Shut it down. Give it up. Walk away. No! Why do we let ourselves go down line of thinking? We have to stop it long before it gets to that point. Because you know what? Your initial inspiration—those experts, the ones who have been at this game longer than you? The ones who have “arrived”? First of all, they probably have been at it longer than you. You never saw their early work when they were first starting out. You didn’t see draft one of novel one that sits in a desk drawer or on a floppy disk gathering dust in a closet somewhere. And you know what else? Most of them have probably had these same thoughts. Maybe 20 years ago, maybe ten. Maybe the last time they battled these thoughts was an hour ago. They read other writers whose work both inspired and intimidated. But they pushed past those voices or shut them down—or they plugged their ears and refused to listen. They knew that to learn how to write, they had to write. So they kept writing. They kept making their art. They kept learning and growing and improving and trying. They pushed through it and wrote. Have you seen that Ira Glass video? Someone took a clip from a longer interview and made into a video. In it, Ira Glass talked about filling the gap. If you haven’t seen it, take a minute to watch it below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY I’ll touch on a couple of his main ideas here, but you’ll enjoy hearing Ira Glass himself say this in his own words. He was talking about how we start out making our art and see this big gap between the kind of art we’re making, and the kind of art that drew us into it,

#55: Writers Should Say Yes to New Experiences Jun 16, 2016

Show notes

It seems like writers are encouraged to do three things: Apply bottom to chair, write regularly, and read a lot. This is great advice, and I encourage writers to do all three. But there are a lot of other things a person can do to become a stronger, more interesting writer. One of those is to say yes to new experiences. I got this advice in a session at the first writing conference I ever went to. The presenter appeared to be heading into middle age—did not look like much of a risk taker—and she was saying we as writers should say yes to new experiences. She talked about how it would make us stronger writers because the more experiences we had, the more we could draw from in our writing. It made so much sense to me. I thought, Yeah, the more senses I tap into, the more memories I form, the more conversations I have, the more places I visit, the more I can write about. To give us an example from her life, she said in all those years she had never been water skiing, but was finally given the opportunity and decided to give it a try. It’s funny she used that example, because for a lot of people, that would not be a crazy-new experience, but for me, it was. I’d never been water skiing, either. Something about it terrified me, too; it seemed like complete lack of control—like a carnival ride with no rails or safety harness. I listened closely as she described her experience: the sensation of the water spraying her face, of flying across the surface of the lake. It sounded so appealing—and she’d already convinced me that new experiences would give me more material for my writing. I decided if I were given the opportunity to try something like that, I'd say yes. Not too long after, I was indeed given the opportunity to go water skiing. And because of her advice, I said yes. I got a quick explanation from my friend who would be driving the boat, and lots of other friends stood on the shore bearing witness to my “yes.” They watched as I took hold of the handle, the boat took off, I started to ski just a little bit, and then...I had the most spectacular wipeout ever, at least according to my friends. They said they’d never seen such a thing: I toppled head over heel, and one of the skis popped off my foot and flew through the air and somehow flipped around so the tip jabbed me in the hip, gouging deep. It happened in slow-motion for me. Stunned, I swam back to the shore, stood up, walked out of the water. My friends were all describing the event, gesturing wildly to reenact the flipping. I couldn’t even speak. I walked back to the house where we were staying and just sat for a while. Alone. Trying to settle my discombobulated, disoriented self. And I thought, Is this what that writer meant when she said we needed new experiences? ‘Cause I sure did get a new set of sensations. Yes. I mean, maybe that’s not what she meant, but yes, I could use that. I tapped into more senses, formed more memories, and had more to write about. I thought I would be writing about the joy of zooming across the water’s surface, but instead, if I can recreate the crazy, topsy-turvy scene in a short story or essay (or podcast), I’ve got material. So I think she’s right. Go ahead and take the trip, try the zip line, explore the cave, hike that mountain, tour that museum, visit that distant relative. And if you’ve never gone water skiing, I think you should say yes. At least once. Because even if an experience doesn’t turn out quite the way you imagined or expected, you’ll have more to write about when you take that other advice: to apply bottom to chair, and write. Go ahead and say yes to that new experience. Regardless of the outcome, your life is going to be richer, and so will your writing.

#54: It's Good for a Writer to Ask Why Jun 09, 2016

Show notes

When’s the last time you asked yourself "Why?" Why am I pursuing writing? Why am I writing this particular project? Why am I working on this book proposal or replying to this email or spending time over here on Facebook when I should be finishing an article to meet a deadline—and why “should” I be finishing that article? Asking why about why we write helps us get to the root of our life motivation. Why Do You Write? And why do you write what you write? Asking this from time to time—exploring it, maybe even through a quick daily review—helps us stay on track and avoid shiny object syndrome, because if we know the overall reason why we write, we can say no to the opportunities and requests that come up, realizing they don’t fit with our why. We can have multiple answers to the question of why we write: We can write for our own pleasure, to express our thoughts clearly, to get the stories and ideas out. Maybe we write because we want to share those stories and ideas with others, or we want fame and fortune, or we want to preserve details about events or to make an impact on the world. A lot of writing life questions flow from bigger questions and bigger issues, so although I’m not a life coach, I often end up talking with clients about higher-level issues in their lives. If you spend some time pondering this “Why?” question at a more existential level or from a values angle, determining your main values as you try to figure out your purpose, you may find clarity for a lot of areas in your life, not just your writing. But that could be overwhelming, and since people meet up with me to talk about writing, writing is a good place to start asking why. Writing is such a revealing process, whether we write privately or publicly, we might as well start by asking “Why write?” and let that start to reveal other ideas about the "why" of our lives overall. Why do you write? Be honest about your answer. If you really just want to make money from writing, record that somewhere, like in a journal, and own it. Knowing that you want to make money—even earn a living—from your writing will help you make practical decisions; instead of submitting essays to literary journals, for example, you might focus on building a business doing technical or corporate writing. If your compelling reason for writing is to contribute memorable art without regard for financial gain, knowing that is your “why” will help you make decisions about how you funnel your creative energy. If your “why” is to gain popularity in a particular genre, you’ll study the market and focus in on that goal, and decisions will be far easier than if you generally think you want to write because it satisfies your creative impulse. Maybe you write for fun, to make people laugh, to reveal an issue you’ve seen and want to bring to light. You want to help people, entertain people, touch people, connect with people. The Evolution of Your Why As you write, your “why” may evolve, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean your principles have crumpled or your dreams are dying. It may mean you’re discovering new dreams and see new possibilities you may not have even known existed! In the year 1997, who knew blogging would be a thing? In 2000, who imagined someone could write a novel or memoir, image by image on Instagram? Maybe these new possibilities have awakened a new “why”: to lasso current technology and playfully discover new ways to interact with people, writing tighter and clearer poetry and prose. You might not have even thought like that in the early stages of your career because you couldn’t have imagined it. You might have looked around at what existed—books, magazines, newspapers—and worked within those constraints. Why This Particular Project?

#53: Need Writing Ideas? Take Inventory of Your Life! Jun 02, 2016

Show notes

In the first creative writing course I took in college, I felt like my life was boring. I had nothing interesting to write about. The professor told us to pull from childhood memories, so I wrote a poem about feeding the cows on the farm where I grew up. When I read the poem aloud in […]

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