Blisscraft Life With Christina Katz

The difference between a professional writer and a hobbyist often simply comes down to the quality of the writing.

There are many ways to help readers relate to your writing but writers often skip these opportunities and give their writing weak effort instead.

Bottom line: professionals strive to write well. We are always trying to write better than in the past. We always hope to get our point across effectively, regardless of the style of communication or genre.

Weak effort equals weak writing. And that’s writing that’s likely to to go unread in a competitive marketplace.

Don’t let this happen to you. Drive your message home with these simple strategies for more compelling writing.

Compel the reader by adding:

1. Illustrations
2. Analogies
3. Stories
4. Studies
5. Photos
6. Diagrams
7. Tables
8. Statistics
9. Breaking news
10. Facts
11. Comparisons
12. Quotes by well-known people
13. Quotes from people like the reader
14. Quotes from experts
15. Quotes from popular books on the subject
16. Definitions
17. Anecdotes (short, illustrative stories about yourself or someone else)
18. References to other media (film, television, radio, the Internet)
19. Helpful tools, resources or products

Things get pretty quiet around here once classes launch.

And I have to admit that I love nothing better than the sound of writers hard at work.

Do you know what writers sound like when they are working?

When writers are working, they don’t make any sound at all.

Of course, there is a burst of activity once a week, as class work gets turned in, reviewed and recirculated, but mostly there is just the sound of silence.

God I love that sound. It’s so…industrious.

Sure there are always little bursts of questions or requests for clarification, but mostly, gloriously, there is the consistent roar of silent, focused work.

That silence is music to my ears. It is the same place where my creativity comes to life, so I’m thrilled when my students embrace it and run with it and ride it to wherever it wants to take them.

The world has become awfully noisy and all the cacophony is not doing a thing for anyone’s creativity.

There are plenty of folks who are happy splashing around in the noise. But I’m not one of them. I don’t crave it. And it’s not where I feel my most creative. It’s not where I get the most done.

The silence is where I go on a daily basis to get my work done. I hope you will try it out. I hope, when you do that you find that still, silent place inside of you where the world stops and the magic starts.

Loving the sound of silence does not make you anti-social. It simply means you are creative. You are allowed to be creative. You are allowed to go to your most silent places, where your  creative potential is lurking in the nooks and crannies of your soul, just hoping you will notice it and coax it out.

I have five, count ’em five, classes starting this week.

This is the first time in a long time that I have not had a stack of major deadlines ahead of me, so I am taking advantage of the situation and teaching a couple more classes than usual.

And I cannot wait!

As I work on class rosters, I can’t help but smile because the quality of my students is so darn high that it is a privilege to teach these folks. High-quality students bring up the quality of the experience for the entire class.

The five classes I’m teaching that start this week are:

Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff (especially for moms)

Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform (for writers in any genre)

Pitching Practice: Write Six Queries in Six Weeks (for nonfiction writers with published clips)

Micro-publishing for Mom Writers (for former students who wish to write and publish a short e-book in any genre so long as they can compose it in six weeks)

60 Ways To Flex Your Content & Prosper In Your Niche (great way to generate a ton of content in your specialty or specialties)

You can learn more here. If you have questions, do not hesitate to e-mail me at christina at christina katz dot com.

If you want in, do not dilly dally because classes begin tomorrow. Registration ends at midnight the night before the class starts. No late registrations are accepted.

If you are not ready to jump in right now, or you need to save up for a bit, I am also teaching four more classes beginning in October.

Writing & Publishing the Short Stuff (especially for moms)

Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform (for writers in any genre)

60 Ways To Flex Your Content & Prosper In Your Niche (great way to generate a ton of content in your specialty or specialties)

Become Your Own Imprint: For Serial Micro-publishers (for advanced students and micro-publishers only)

And in case you forgot: returning students receive big discounts on classes. Dream team members receive even deeper discounts. Contact me for a special sign up link if you qualify.

Here’s to your success this fall! Hope to work with you soon.

You intend to build a prosperous career that centers around writing.

You already write nonfiction, fiction, memoir, poetry, or any other kind of professional-quality writing.

You intend to earn money in the long run via your platform, your name, and your good reputation as the draw for future/current profits.

You don’t care about branding yourself. In fact, the whole idea makes you uncomfortable.

You are traditionally published. You are also either already self-published or you are open to the possibility in the future.

You want to understand what platform means to the point where deepening and expanding yours becomes a natural extension of everything else you do as part of your daily routine.

You are sick to death of buzzwords that don’t help you clarify who you are and what you offer or anything else worth your time.

You do not find that reading endless articles on platform by a never-ending parade of platform experts is helping you build a platform that distinguishes you from the rest of the people reading those same articles.

You are not sure why you are social networking.

You spend too much time social networking without seeing results.

You don’t understand how social networking is supposed to help you create writing career success, never mind profits.

You plan to become known as a thought leader in your field, or you at least like the idea that other people would you refer to you this way some day. Like in reality, not just in a fantasy.

If any of these describe you, I would be happy to work with your towards creating a more satisfying, thriving, and prosperous writing career.

My six-week class, Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform begins on September 5th or October 24th. LINK

If you are not ready for this class, my PDF Workbook, Discover Your Platform Potential, is available any time for you to use independently on your own time. LINK

Any writer can benefit from reading the straightforward common sense approach in my Writer’s Digest book, Get Known Before the Book Deal, which has been widely acclaimed as the “bible” of platform basics. LINK

If you are confused or stuck or stalled about what actual platform development looks like and would look like for you. Or if you are simply eager to get focused and find your writing career momentum, I look forward to working with you!

~ Photo by Roger Smith

Here is a list of things I say all the time. See if they sound familiar…

• Don’t imagine a career that will look like someone else’s; grow one that will look like yours.
• Learn to cultivate your best ideas.
• Match your ideas with appropriate markets.
• Know who your best audiences are.
• Overcome editor-phobia.
• Build up increasingly stronger clips as you write.
• Spend more time writing than you spend fantasizing about writing.
• Expect good things but don’t complain when things don’t go your way.
• When nothing else seems to be working, get up earlier or go to bed later.
• Balance your introverted and extroverted sides.
• Find a community of writers with similar goals as you.
• Don’t expect your community to do your work.
• Always be learning from the careers of writers you admire.
• Lift-off happens when you start seeing you name in print.
• Keep doing whatever you did before that was successful.
• Keep submitting to or querying wider-reaching publications.
• Don’t let go of regular assignments until you’ve replaced them with better, regular assignments.
• Get faster and more efficient as you go along.
• Recognize what works in your career and turn those mechanics into habits.
• Start keeping a portfolio of your work and revisit it at least quarterly.
• Pick a time of year that is best for you to do your planning.
• Don’t piggy back your ambitions on other people’s hard-won resources.
• Continually increase the size of your goals.
• Find supporters who will help you stay accountable to your goals.
• When something good happens, pause and appreciate your efforts.
• Become determined to learn when supposedly bad things that happen.
• Become the most resilient person you know.
• Remember that success is not about talent; it’s about having a positive attitude, giving your best effort, and feeling satisfied with yourself and your results.
• And you should still always be getting better at what you write and everything you do.
• Memorize this: you can’t control what happens. But if you are committed, you will likely see your career prosper.

~ Image by Carole Brown

Just as the moon travels through cycles, so does a writing career.

You can’t be solar all the time. You can’t be constantly out there, constantly shining, constantly effusing creative power and still create original works of excellent quality.

It just won’t work for most people. An exception might be a very social person with exceptionally good time management skills, who can still carve out the needed alone time to do quality work.

But more writers are not necessarily terrific at time management. Most of us are ruled by intuition and instincts. That’s how we got to be and continue to be good writers in the first place.

Writers are animals. We are natural creatures who are not always as civilized as others might like us to be. At least the best writers have protected and maintained a part of their voice that can be wild and unbridled.

You need to avoid constant limelight, writers. You need to be allowed to have a new moon–the time in the lunar cycle when the moon is not visible at all.

We are writers. We are heady and mental and social and civilized. Most of us talk to much, even if only in our heads. But we need to disappear sometimes. We need to not be in demand every second. We need to ebb as much as we flow.

Let yourself have alone time, writers. Your success depends on it.

~ Photo by puliarf

Second update: Once we got the Paypal button working, we raised the money for Kathy to take the class in Bill’s honor in just over two hours. I have taken the donation button down. Thank you so much, everyone. Kathy is thrilled and ready to work!

Update: Because classes begin a week from Wednesday and students need to do introductory work to participate, please make your donation by Wednesday, August 29th by midnight. Thank you for giving. It all comes back around.

One of my students recently passed away. I heard from his wife yesterday in response to one of the recent class announcements I’d sent out,

Bill loved your courses and books.  He would still be involved I am sure, but he lost his battle with cancer on July 12.  I will unsubscribe him but wanted you to know why.  Thanks for the encouragement you gave, he always appreciated you.

I am stunned. Apparently I held the belief that my students are immortal. Even as I type those absurd words, a part of me wants to insist that they are true. My students really should be immortal. I would prefer that to this.

So imagine my shock when the first former student death I have heard of in eleven years of teaching was the passing of one of the most committed students. Bill shocked me the first time last spring when he joined one of my Discover Your Specialty & Launch Your Platform Classes and just crushed it. I have been fortunate to have a lot of committed and hardworking students over the years, but Bill just came along and showed us all how it’s done.

Week after week, I would read his assignments with my mouth hanging open. His willingness to dive deep into his past professional life and dig, dig, dig until he came back up with gems that he described in tight, descriptive prose was remarkable. Bill had already done a lot in the world when he came to my class, but he was ready to reinvent himself after retirement and he went after his platform development with a gusto that taught the teacher a thing or two along the way.

I pulled up some of Bill’s old work, because I keep all of my student’s old work. Even though I don’t have the greatest memory in the world for say, remembering names in person or recalling pop trivia, I will often remember things my students wrote for many years after their classes have ended.

Two weeks before the class ended, Bill was diagnosed with cancer. He didn’t say anything until after the class, he just continued to crush his work all the way through, never missing a beat. Bill told me about the diagnosis when he turned in his class feedback form. There was no doubt in my mind that Bill was going to beat the cancer the same way he had crushed my class. Maybe I even foolishly thought that his new-found commitment to his platform was going to assist him in squelching the cancer, so he could get joyfully and productively back to work.

And now, just a little over a year later, Bill is gone.

I am somewhat comforted by reading Bill’s obituary, which provides a fuller picture of his life than the one I had gotten in class. And yet, it seems that how Bill did anything was how Bill did everything. He exuded a calm joy and level of commitment that are rare for fickle humans. I feel very fortunate that I got to meet Bill. I only ever met him and worked with him over e-mail, but I totally got Bill, and he totally got me. Communicating that essence of who you are and what you offer is central to what I do in the world. In a sense, Bill showed me how powerful and effective my work could be by doing it more thoroughly than it had been done before.

In Bill’s honor, I have decided to start a special kind of scholarship…

The Bill Hay Scholarship is a fundraiser for a student who wishes to take one of my advanced classes, who would not otherwise be able to take the class for financial reasons. Unlike my Writer Mama Scholarship, this fundraiser scholarship is not going to be a regular thing. I will reserve this fundraiser scholarship for unusual circumstances as I see fit.

This first fundraiser for the Bill Hay Scholarship is to support Kathy Dubin Flynn in her desire to micro-publish an e-book that will share her story as the recipient of a bone marrow transplant. Kathy knows that she will not receive any special treatment in the class and that she will be expected to give the class her very best effort, just as Bill did.

If you would like to see Kathy Dubin Flynn receive the first Bill Hay Scholarship for Micro-publishing for Mom Writers, you can make a donation of any size by clicking on the Paypal button below. Just insert how much you’d like to give and hit “Donate Now.” I will pay the Paypal fees on these non-tax deductible donations. When we get to $299.00, I will take the button down and let you all know.

[The paypal button has been removed because we have raised the $300 for Kathy to take the class. Thank you to everyone who donated. You will receive an e-mail confirmation.]

For my part, I feel like I have come to terms with the reality that taking my classes will not save anyone’s life. But I am more keenly aware, because of Bill’s passing, that taking my classes can have positive results in the world in ways I would not have imagined.

So, goodbye, Bill. Thank you for sharing your passions with me. I heard you and I’m passing it on. Rest in peace.

I am a panel host on the main floor of Wordstock Literary Festival 2012. The topic of the panel is Current and Future Trends In Self-Marketing on Saturday, October 13th at 3:00 pm.

I will also be a workshop instructor. The topic of the workshop is Mailbox Full of Money on Sunday, October 14th at 10:30 am.

Looks like they are about to announce the full roster of attending authors and events, so stay tuned if you are local!

Wordstock is always a ton of fun, I hope you can make it!

One reason writers come to me for classes and coaching is that writing career growth is inevitably uncomfortable.

We think, at the outset, that our writing career is going to make us over-the-moon happy. But this is a myth.

Those over-the-moon moments come and go. You should have some once in a while, but they are not the constant.

I think veteran writers with multiple published books under their belts probably have achieved an element of satisfaction that eludes writers on the rise.

And when I say “multiple,” I mean about ten books. I had to write three traditionally published books to get happy but one of them is about writing career satisfaction, so that’s probably how I got here a few books sooner.

So, if you are crabby or upset or anxious today, writer, then congratulations, because you are probably growing.

If you feel stumped or challenged, I think that’s great.

If you are frustrated to the point of tears or total exasperation, then wow, you must really be taking risks and stretching yourself. Good for you!

The bottom line is that growth is difficult. Be careful who you turn to at moments of complete frustration. You don’t need someone to stroke your ego or baby you. You need someone who will encourage you to face the frustration, learn what you need to learn from it, and move on to the next thing you need to do.

I am used to working with frustrated writers because frustration is the norm.

And if you’re not frustrated, then maybe you are not stretching yourself enough.

The whips start cracking around here on September 5th. I will be helping writers take their work to the next level. No egos will be stroked. No baloney will be indulged. And lots of excellent work will get accomplished. Because that’s what I’m all about.

And if this appeals to your itch to succeed, then I hope you will check out my latest book and my fall classes.

~ Photo by Candie_N