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I was listening to a writing podcast yesterday and I heard one of the “experts” say that writers should determine what they don’t enjoy doing or don’t do well and focus on shoring up these weak points, and the others on the pod all chimed in with agreement.
 
Probably because it seems like a sensible course of action.
 
But with art—as opposed to engineering, for example—“sensible” doesn’t always equal “successful.”
 
I know a woman who can’t write in 1st person for anything. She said when she’s in the head of a character, narrating the story as that person, it just doesn’t work for her. The sensible thing would have been for her to find some writing prompts and start writing shorter scenes in 1st person, working up to short stories and then attempting to write book-length fiction with a 1st person POV. Especially since her interest is mostly in YA-ish areas, where 1st person is pretty common.
 
But instead…
 
Instead she just wrote in 3rd person—which she really enjoyed and which felt natural to her—and she ended up cutting a swath through the market… going on to have over 70 books published by major imprints, including several big bestsellers plus a movie made from one of her books. And she still doesn’t vibe with 1st person.
 
Or how about the seminal SF author who famously stated he couldn’t write relationship stuff—especially about romance—yet went on to have over three-hundred books published, across multiple genres, including some bestselling novels that are still beloved (and widely read) over 70 years after they were initially published…???
 
Or what about the currently-hot author who admits dialog isn’t his strong point. So he writes books with way more interior monolog than dialog… which then go on to sell millions of copies and be made into films…???
 
This isn’t a post on POV or subject matter or dialog or any other craft-centric topic. (Other than to say: Ignore all the pundits online and for God’s sake just do what works for you and your writing brain.)
 
Or a post on the fact that a lot of online writing advice is just people telling you how they work, which may have zero relationship to you or your writing. (Which is largely true, but then you probably already knew that.)
 
It’s this: I don’t know what a “well-rounded” writer is, other than the fact that I don’t want to be one.
 
And neither do you.
 
Think about the sort of adjectives we usually attach to beloved writers: Unique. Voicey. Individual. Absorbing. Expressive. Urgent. Compelling. Distinctive. Emotive. Vibey. Gripping. One-of-a-kind. Inimitable.
 
The above is basically a list of antonyms for “well-rounded.”
 
Yet the process of making a list of areas where you have either lower interest or lower mastery and then setting about raising your abilities in these areas is largely the recommended path one would take to shore up these “weak areas” and become more well-rounded as a writer.
 
And… this is the standard advice when someone says they can’t write description or don’t like to write action scenes or whatever.
 
Maybe… just maybe… you’d be better off doing what you enjoy and playing to your strengths (which are likely the same thing) instead of trying to be all things to all readers.
 
The brilliant John Wooden once said, “Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do.”
 
There’s a reason you like the parts of writing you like. It has to do with the unique way the creative part of your brain works… something about that particular aspect of writing tickles your brain in a manner that makes it come up with new and interesting ways of expressing it. (And the reverse applies to the areas you’re not that interested in… and thus not that good at.)
 
Yes, if you desperately want to write a romcom yet you don’t enjoy writing about romantic relationships, you’re going to have to do some serious homework to shore up that aspect of your writing.
 
But assuming your literary desires line up with your literary strengths (which is the case with most of us, for obvious reasons) then perhaps the best advice simply might be something my dad always said, “Do what you do best!”
 
After all, a well-rounded knife never cut through anything.
 
Happy writing!
 

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These things seem to come in waves. I did a little tour last fall (for 9:09 – maybe three weeks) which—along with a number of in-store signings—included half a dozen school and library type events, so I developed a basic presentation that would work for most of them with a few tweaks.
 
But then we went out on a larger/longer tour this spring which—as anchor points between in-store events—included things like doing the opening keynote at the awesome Colorado Teen Lit Con, along with some larger school events and a few writing classes, etc.
 
And a couple of months before we left, I looked at the itinerary, gulped, and said to myself, Holy crap, you’re gonna need some all-new programs… maybe several of them!
 
This can feel daunting as your brain spins around the questions of: Where do I start, what do I do, and how do I do it…??? However, as with drafting almost any how-to nonfiction piece, it can help to begin with a structure.
 
And not to get all instructor-geeky on you, but one of the best ways to develop a new program is to use the tools of the Standardized Approach to Training: A.D.D.I.E. (Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation.)
 
Don’t shudder and run away. Those are just fancy words describing a common-sense way to decide what to do, how to do it, and how to determine if it’s working. As follows…
 
Analysis: This initial step is where you determine what sort of presentation you’re going to build and give, based on the needs of your attendees. (Which could be school students, bookstore customers, conference attendees, workshop clients, etc.) These each have different needs. School presentations should be educational and entertaining. Bookstores have a fairly general audience with an obvious bias toward reading. People attending workshops are writing-centered and typically place a higher focus on actionable information and advice than entertainment. (Not that it needs to be bone dry… humor is almost always welcome at the right times.)
 
Design: Decide on an overall structure and make an outline for your presentation. (Examples: maybe a PowerPoint with lecture for conferences; “Draw and talk” for those of you who both illustrate and write; Storytelling with props for story time type events; a specific how-to lesson with guided exercises for workshops; etc.)
 
Development: Take your outline and fill in all the details. In other words, add meat to the skeleton by actually building the presentation you outlined above. Just like writing a story, don’t expect to get it perfect the first time. It’s an iterative process… write/revise/write/revise until it feels smooth and tight. (Leaving some room for on-the-fly improvisation, if that’s your vibe.)
 
Implementation: This is (theoretically) simple: you give the presentation you designed and built. But for many this is the hardest part—getting up in front of a live audience and presenting your material in a way that comes off as smooth and professional, yet personable and entertaining. Everyone is different and there are whole books on dealing with public speaking so we’re not doing a deep dive here, but there is one tactic that seems universally helpful: practice. I’m fine speaking to customers in a bookstore or presenting to kids, but frankly, doing a more formal presentation to a room full of writers or educators can make me a little nervous. What helps me is going somewhere quiet and giving the presentation—aloud—multiple times, well in advance of the event.
 
Evaluation: How did it go? Any slow spots where the audience seemed bored or antsy? Did the presentation run long… or did you run out of material halfway through? Any pertinent points you failed to make? This is where we close the loop back to ‘Analysis’ and make any possible improvements after the fact. Use your own assessment, but also touch base with a friend or acquaintance who attended, if possible. Sometimes presenters have a form for receiving feedback from attendees, depending on the nature of the event. Whatever the feedback, roll the actionable parts of it back into the ADDIE loop and make the next version even stronger. (But don’t over-think this. Give a few presentations and you’ll start organically making changes/improvements to the material without even thinking about it.)
 
Some tips from the trenches:
Pay attention to overall time during the dry runs. If you have 60 minutes to present, don’t have a presentation that takes you 60 minutes to get through. You’ll almost certainly lose a few minutes to admin stuff and introductions at the start and other things will crop up, and you’ll either end up rushing to finish it or you’ll have to end in the middle of a section—both less-than-optimum. Instead, plan accordingly and make adjustments as you get close so you end on time. (Sort of like a “two-minute drill,” if your closing segment takes five minutes, segue into it six or seven minutes before the end time so you can stick the landing without zipping through the most important parts.)
 
If you’re planning on a Q&A section, budget adequate space for it. ‘Adult Education’ is primarily about giving your attendees actionable information (i.e. stuff they can use) as opposed to entertainment or broadly educational content. In longer workshops I’ll often build-in a Q&A break after each section, and sometimes almost half of the overall class can be Q&A.
 
Get to know your specific audience. I’ll usually do a quick show-of-hands assessment to find out who’s there, their experience level, and what they really want to know. Then you can adjust your presentation accordingly and put a little more focus on their specific needs.
 
Remember why you’re there. You’re there to give your audience something of value, whether that’s motivating kiddos to read, aiding emerging writers in navigating the publishing industry, or helping workshop clients construct tight dialog. It’s about them, not you. To that end…
 
Skip the long self-intro. They probably know who you are and why you’re there—no need for the whole ego-boosting CV. A quick “My name is X and I’ve done Y” should suffice. (Or better yet, just jump right in with some interesting/useful information and hook them from the word “go”.)
 
Try to take video (or at least an audio recording on your phone) of your early presentations or classes and review them with a critical eye. I did, and learned that once I’m wound up and going, I can start talking too fast if I’m not careful. It’s amazing what we can learn by listening after the fact when we’re not caught up in the moment.
 
Have a “contact” page onscreen at the end of your presentation where appropriate, for any follow-up and/or feedback.
 
Always thank your host (festival or bookstore or school or conference or library, etc.). It’s a lot of work to put on whatever event you were part of, and people appreciate being appreciated. Plus, one of the best ways to get further offers to present is positive word-of-mouth from previous hosts.
 
 
Happy presenting!
 

 
In a moment of irony, we’re going to start this post with a pop quiz…
 
Questions:
 
1. What’s one of the biggest precursors for success not only in school, but in life?
 
2. What’s an activity that students seem to either completely love or totally despise, depending on how it’s administered?
 
3. What is the term for students perusing graphic novels, comic books, and silly picture books full of fart jokes?
 
4. What do we call it when students choose books with inappropriate Lexile scores, either well above or below the student’s assumed ability to comprehend?
 
5. What subject—as opposed to, say, math—can be forever lost to the student by too much dissection, too early?
 
Extra Credit: What’s THE terminal objective for having kids read in school?
 
Answers:
 
1. Reading*.
 
2. Reading*.
 
3. Reading*.
 
4. Reading*.
 
5. Reading*.
 
Extra Credit: Instill in them a lifelong love of reading*. Nothing more. Nothing less.
 
*NOTE: As used here, we’re referring to the common practice of sitting down with a book—fiction or otherwise, classic or contemporary—and simply reading it for enjoyment and edification. Yes, a math or history lesson requires reading, and analysis and testing of the material presented is an important part of the lesson, but the main point of reading a math lesson has little to do with enjoying the actual words in the textbook.
 
Nowhere in the common definition of “reading” is there anything about memorizing and regurgitating sections of the book in question. Nor anything about analyzing and dissecting the work in question to ascertain “greater” meaning than that contained within the words on the page. Nothing about using reading as prep for a test on the very same reading, either—a cart-before-the-horse exercise wherein the results of the test end up more important than the actual reading of the book.
 
So why do we do this? I think it largely comes from a well-intentioned desire to apply metrics to the subject. And for the more Boolean, STEM-centric subjects, yes, we often need to quantify results to measure progress. So we tend to think we need to create a methodology to dissect, measure, and test all subject matter.
 
But for the more right-brained subjects, applying this mindset often does more harm than good. (One of the banes of my corporate existence was the oft-repeated dictum, “If you can’t put numbers around it, it doesn’t exist.” Hint: people who say this might make good accountants but are almost universally poor supervisors.)
 
So, what should we do? I humbly offer three strategies:
 
1. Start with the Hippocratic oath: First, do no harm. The first goal of any reading program should be that the student ends up with a love of reading such that they will continue the habit going forward. If that’s all that happens, that’s a wonderful success. But if the student ends up with a correlation in their brain between “reading” and “work,” then—regardless of all the curriculum objectives you’ve met on paper—the program is a total failure for that student. (Similar to sports programs that use running laps as punishment. Way to go, coach—you’ve just created a life-long negative association with one of the healthiest activities a person can engage in: aerobic exercise…)
 
2. Be mindful of selection criteria. You’ve probably seen the recent (and infamous) “recommended reading list” from Florida’s Dept. of Education that’s almost entirely comprised of books written before I was born, let alone the students. (Imagine a list for middle graders—put out in 2019!—that starts with Black Beauty, Heidi, The Secret Garden, The Velveteen Rabbit, The Wind in the Willows, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Anne of Green Gables. And I didn’t cherry-pick these… they’re simply the first seven titles on the list. The rest are more of the same. Who in the world thought today’s tweens might relate to those?) The same issues come with using big awards as selection criteria. (A famous report on the past 30 years of children’s literature says, “The Newbery has probably done far more to turn kids off to reading than any other award in children’s publishing.”) Remember, the first objective isn’t to introduce the students to “the brilliance of the classics,” it’s to get them to love reading. Which means they need to actually enjoy what they read, especially for the first few years of independent reading. Toward that end…
 
3. Let the kids pick their reading material. Obviously there needs to be assigned reading at times (but even then, please try to select something the kids might actually enjoy reading!), but it’s hard to over-stress the importance of actually letting the students select their own books—on their own—without “guidance” or “Lexile scoring” or “recommendations” (unasked-for) or any other type of thumbing the scale. If they ask for recommendations, then yes! This is where great librarians and teachers shine—they can pair up a student with a book in a way that seems almost like magic to an outsider (when it’s mostly deep knowledge of the material—including current books—paired with a deep love of books and reading, along with serious time and effort on their part). But one of the keys to developing a love of reading is the feeling of autonomy a student gets when they choose a book that they think might actually interest them (as opposed to their teacher), make the effort to read it, and end up actually liking it (both validating their choice and providing motivation to try the process again… win-win!).
 
Speaking of the primacy of student choice, Penny Kittle—in Book Love, her book on getting students to love both reading and writing—says, “Allowing students to make choices about what they read has been presented in our profession, especially at the secondary level, as enrichment—something to do once the hard work is over. I believe, instead, that it is at the center of our work.” And, “I believe all students need to own their reading in the same way I believe they must own their writing.”
 
For many kids, reading enjoyment seems to peak in mid-late elementary grades then fall off somewhere in those tween middle school years… and sometimes never recovers. (And in schools where this doesn’t seem as prevalent, I’ve noticed they usually have deeply engaged librarians and language arts teachers.) In my own informal polling of young people, “They made us read crappy books!” and “They made it into work!” were two of the top reasons why this happens, along with basically being “too busy” for pleasure reading.
 
The busy-ness aspect is a separate subject, but if we take care of the first two issues and they actually learn to enjoy reading—and writing—then they’re more likely to stick with it even when life gets a little hectic.
 
Going back to the opening question (what’s one of the biggest precursors for success…?), pleasure reading actually has to do with a lot more than pleasure. So helping our kiddos develop a love of reading is beneficial to them well beyond the language arts arena, and well beyond school itself.
 
Happy writing… and reading!