Tag: #AmWriting

Editing Your Own Work

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Four Tricks to Publishing Error-free Copy

In an ideal world, everything you publish gets the benefit of an editor’s eyes—and even a bit of copyediting and then a round or two of proofreading. But if you’ve ever rushed to get a blog, email, or social post out there, you know that sometimes there simply isn’t time for all that thorough review.

But you can catch a surprising number of things when you give your own writing a second look! The trick is to do a little more than merely rereading what you’ve just typed up.

Here are my favorite four ways to edit my own work.

open laptop on a desk next to an open notebook and a ceramic mug

1. Read It Out Loud

This sometimes catches people off guard. Your readers aren’t likely to read a blog post or email newsletter aloud to themselves, after all—and unless you’re writing a script for audio or video content, neither are you.

Even so, reading your writing out loud can help clue you in to awkward phrasing, repetitive language, or errors that your eyes glossed over but your ears picked up right away.

You don’t need to make a big production out of it; sometimes just saying the words out loud as you type them can make a big difference. So can whispering them to yourself when you’re done with a first draft. Of course, if you are writing a script of some kind, taking it a step or two further and recording yourself reading it back can be extra helpful before you decide to call it finished.

2. Read It Backward

Just as our eyes have a tendency to gloss over suboptimal sentences, they also have a habit of fixing typos before we actually see them. If you’ve ever seen one of those “the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef” posts on social media, you know that your brain is exceptionally skilled in skipping mistakes and still grasping the meaning of misspelled words.

That is great news for being able to read or skim with ease, but it makes proofreading especially difficult—particularly when it’s your own work. You already know what you’re trying to say, so errors aren’t likely to trip you up.

Starting at the end and working backward makes it much easier to spot mistakes. That’s because you’re working against the flow of your writing, giving your mind enough of a pause to see what’s actually on the page—instead of what you’re already expecting to see.

3. Read It Formatted

You might draft your writing in a plain old Word document or Google Doc (or maybe you’re super old school and handwrite it). So try reviewing your writing once it’s formatted! Don’t spend your time editing in that draft file. Instead, get those words into the social media platform, web editor, or other publisher you’ll be using and review your writing in ready-to-publish format.

Like reading it aloud, editing this way can help you go beyond misspellings, typos, and missing words and find issues that aren’t strictly errors. That’s typically when you should be doing your proofreading anyway. That way, you can catch spacing concerns, bad line breaks, broken links, and problems with photos, captions, or other design elements.

4. Read It After a Pause

This is the best tactic I use for my own writing. Rereading something right after you’ve written it isn’t likely to help you see gaps, mistakes, or other issues. If you’re short on time already, letting a piece of writing sit for a day or two (or even longer) before you come back to it may not be possible.

But take advantage of any time you have available. Stepping away overnight or for a few hours—or even just for 10 minutes to take a body break or to think about something completely different—can make all the difference in being able to read it with fresh eyes.

It’s true that it sometimes feels like we do our best proofreading after we’ve hit send. That’s why I still like to reread what I’ve written right after I click publish or post. In most cases, I can quickly edit that caption or blog before too many people have seen it. And even if it’s irrevocably out there—like with email—at least I’m aware of it and can decide whether I need to send a correction or just steel myself to catch some grief over that typo.

Pro tip: This one can be especially useful when paired with one of the first three suggestions! Force yourself to walk away for a bit and then come back to read it backward, out loud, or as formatted copy.

Bonus: Hire a Proofreader

I help my clients hit send or publish with confidence!

I’d love to talk to you about reviewing your marketing emails, sales newsletters, blog posts, white papers, press releases—whatever you’re sending out into the world to connect with your audience and attract customers. Tell me what you’re writing!

5 Tricks for Dealing with Writer’s Block

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Strategies for Overcoming the Blank Page

No matter how prolific a writer you are, writer’s block is an inevitability we all face from time to time. If you’re like me, you find yourself sitting at your computer, fingers poised over the keyboard, and . . . nothing.

Vintage typewriter with blank page. Photo by Daniel McCullough on Unsplash.

Maybe you don’t know how to start. Or you get stuck and can’t get going again. Or a few words trickle out, but it’s just not quite what you had in mind.

Whatever block you’re facing, I’ve found that these five tricks help me and my writing find our way again almost every single time.

1. Walking Away—or Just Walking

Taking a walk is my go-to solution for writer’s block because it’s the one that works the best the most often. Sometimes I’ve got too many different things floating around in my head—multiple client projects, maybe, or a long list of miscellaneous to-dos to tackle—and my thoughts can’t settle on the writing at hand.

Getting away from my desk helps because I can actually do the thing I’m thinking about (move the laundry, check the mailbox). And sometimes taking my mind off forcing the writing helps me return to the keyboard with fresh eyes and fresh ideas.

Still, I try not to give in to the temptation to walk away too quickly. If I notice that I’m struggling, I’ll make a note of the time. If 15 minutes or more pass and I haven’t managed to get anything down that I feel good about, that’s when I’ll call it quits for a bit.

For a bonus tip, take a page out of Ernest Hemingway’s book and stop in the middle of a sentence when you take a break. It often helps you pick up the momentum a little easier when you come back to your work.

2. Clearing Out the Cobwebs

On Mad Men, Don Draper goes to the movies because he says it “clears out the cobwebs.” He goes to the theater in the middle of the afternoon instead of staying stuck at his desk (was he ever stuck at his desk?).

Like taking a walk, allowing yourself to get lost in a book, movie, or piece of music does wonders for getting your conscious mind off your writing. It can also let your subconscious get to work instead. But, unlike going for a stroll, choosing an immersive creative experience has the added bonus of stoking your creative fires. Inspiration can come from the unlikeliest sources—and visiting other worlds through fiction or excellent filmmaking is often just the ticket.

If you’re not sold, take a lesson from Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way, and think of it as an artist’s date. Julia says we all need, from time to time, to refill our creative wells—lest it dry up. So once a week, prioritize taking your inner artist on a date. She calls it “assigned play” and says it doesn’t need to be “artistic,” just something festive or whimsical or out of the ordinary.

Go outside, browse an interesting shop, make a vision board, build a playlist, take a drive. Come back inspired.

3. Starting at the End

A blank page can feel straight-up threatening, and the pressure of needing to start off with a solid beginning can quickly overwhelm. That’s why I often like to start at the end. Whether it’s writing the end-of-page call-to-action for marketing copy or the witty close to an essay—even the final line in an email I’ve been putting off—sometimes it’s just easier to work backward.

If I’m writing digitally (and I almost always am) I’ll often insert several returns or even a whole page break to visually remind myself that I’m merely skipping ahead a little bit and will come back later to fill it in. You’d be surprised how much of a difference this little mental trick can make!

Working this way can also be a nice reminder that writing is almost never a linear process. It’s okay to skip around and put it together like a puzzle as all the pieces come together. There’s no need to force yourself to write anything in the order it will be read, a common hang-up when fighting writer’s block.

4. Streaming Your Consciousness

Let’s take another cue from Julia Cameron with her beloved morning pages process, the practice of writing three pages (long-hand) first thing in the morning. The idea is, like going to the movies or taking a drive, to clear out the cobwebs of your mind. With stream-of-consciousness writing, you build up the habit of writing without editing or censoring along the way.

That’s the same trick you use if you’ve ever found yourself writing your way in to a piece. Often what we really want to say is buried under all the everyday stuff that clutters up our minds, those to-do lists and reminders and conversations with friends or colleagues. It’s once we get through all that junk that we can arrive at the good stuff.

Try it! Just start writing as though you’re narrating your thoughts. “Narrating your thoughts? Or should it be ‘narrating your mind’? Is that something I can Google? I CANNOT forget to buy dishwasher detergent. Maybe this is the year I actually write a book. I should go ahead and sign up for that painting workshop.” See?

You may have to scrap the first 10% (or even the first 90%) of your efforts before you find the words worth saving. But they’ll be there.

5. Changing Your Environment

Sometimes it’s simply a matter of where you’re sitting (or standing or laying down). Changing my environment is most helpful when I’m dealing with one of two situations. First, I might have been sitting in the same spot for way too long and I feel restless about the setting. Or the scenery around me may be much too distracting (whether because I’ve chosen to sit in the living room and Law & Order reruns are playing on a loop or because I’m somewhere new and I feel overly stimulated by the novelty around me.)

Simply turning the position of my chair and laptop 90 degrees can feel refreshing. So can adjusting ambient sounds—whether that’s turning off something distracting or putting on some white noise to fill the silence.

There have been times when I feel like I need to completely overhaul my surroundings or state of mind to feel like I can get into the flow, but most of the time it’s making a small tweak that reignites the process.

Were any of these strategies familiar to you? Do you have another helpful hint for getting through your writer’s block? I’d love to hear from you!

One Helpful Trick for Preventing Writer’s Block

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A QUICK DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY USE AFFILIATE LINKS.

I started this post intending to say that when you write a lot, you start to write better. Words come more easily, you develop a kind of muscle memory that helps keep you going.

And do you know what happened? Writer’s block.

Proving, if nothing else, that the universe has a sense of humor.

Finding the thread

Writing can be a tricky business. Sometimes I sit down to write and feel like my fingers just cannot type fast enough to keep up. Other times I’ve made myself dizzy spinning in my office chair, hoping to catch any thread of anything to say something at all interesting or valuable.

ink pen and open notebook that only reads "Ummmm..."

Practice does help. As I started building my freelance business, that’s one of the greatest things I noticed: as I transitioned out of a 9-to-5 job that only required me to write in email form—and started writing more long-form content—it became easier to write well. I was more likely to have the speed-typing problem than the chair-spinning problem.

But like so many things in life, a plateau is inevitable. You get into a groove and then it becomes a rut.

Morning pages

One tool I’ve been using to stave off such a rut is the Morning Pages practice from Julia Cameron. I haven’t actually read The Artist’s Way (or at least not past the introduction; curse you, shopping ban) but I’d seen Julia’s name in enough acknowledgements sections to be familiar with the gist of this practice that so many artists swear by: three pages of longhand, stream-of-conscious writing every single morning.

There are no rules to Morning Pages. You just have to keep doing them.

My own Morning Pages practice is still very new. But while there was some horror in showing up on day two and feeling like I’d already run out of things to think (and then write), it’s making a great addition to my day. Usually part brain dump, panic over to-do lists and deadlines, and trying to remember whether or not I’ve already fed the cat, it’s also showing me patterns in my thinking, releasing mental clutter, and giving me the opportunity to play with language that I otherwise might have thought but not written down.

It’s also a chance to engage both my inner critic and my inner mentor, to practice my real-live handwriting, and to reform that callous on my right ring finger that I’ve hated since I was a kid.

If one of the most important ingredients of good writing is just to keep doing it, Morning Pages is creating an invaluable daily space to do just that—writer’s block, be damned.

On Writing Rituals and Routines

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A QUICK DISCLOSURE: THIS POST MAY USE AFFILIATE LINKS.

I had a professor in college who said he had a dedicated laptop for writing. It had never been (would never be) connected to the internet. He only wrote on that computer, standing up at a podium.

Seeking a routine

I often find myself trying to create a specific writing ritual, but I haven’t found anything in particular that’s stuck. Sometimes I write at my desk on a standard desktop PC. Sometimes it’s on my laptop (at my coworking space, at the library, on my couch, in bed) or even on my phone. I write at 8 a.m., at 8 p.m. Occasionally at 2 a.m. I write in silence or with music, with coffee or without.

I’m learning that it really doesn’t matter as long as I keep going. Stephen King wrote in On Writing that “the sort of strenuous reading and writing program I advocate – four to six hours a day, every day – will not seem strenuous if you really enjoy doing these things and have an aptitude for them.”

Even as a bookworm and a professional writer, that can be a tough benchmark to hit consistently.

Setting priorities

There’s always extra stuff on the to-do list, things to be tempted by: getting trapped in my inbox, worrying about my personal brand, doing chores around the house, trying to exercise more than once a year, not shopping, binge-watching Game of Thrones with my husband.

But it feels great to make the time.

This morning I spent a couple hours on my bookkeeping and on client work, and then I spent the afternoon reading a novel from cover to cover before sitting down to write. It felt like such a luxury!

And a rejuvenation. It turns out that writing after a few hours of reading a book (especially when you’re reading for recreational purposes and not out of obligation or requirement) feels a little less harried than after a big chunk of time in front of a screen . . . or several.

Maybe one day I will have an eccentric or very specific writing routine. Until then, I’ll just keep plugging away whenever—and however—I can.

What about you? Do you have a setting, time of day, or tools that you always use to write?

Meditation

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I went to my first meditation class in college, where we did 30- and 45-minute sessions. I enjoyed it so much that I went back to my dorm to place a big Amazon order: floor cushion, mala beads, an eye pillow, most of Jon Kabat-Zinn’s books. It turns out that buying a bunch of props does not automatically create a consistent meditation practice, but that first experience stuck with me and I’ve enjoyed meditating ever since. Here are some ways that meditation has been especially helpful since becoming self-employed:

Transitioning between tasks

Running a one-woman shop means that I’m not just doing work for clients, but also marketing my services, preparing for taxes, and sharpening my skills. More and more studies are showing that multitasking is a farce, but meditation can help! Taking a couple minutes—or even just a few breaths—between to-dos can make all the difference in refocusing my energy and preparing for the next item.

Calming anxiety

Dealing with anxiety is no joke, and the more tools you have the better. Meditation has been a great way to keep anxious feelings in check during busy days and stressful situations. I’ll often put some time of my calendar to meditate, but it’s helpful to remember that I don’t need a whole hour (or a special cushion) to get the benefits. Just taking one or five minutes can be enough to slow down and feel the present moment, lessening the anxiety.

Getting to sleep

Especially if I’ve been up late watching TV or working on a big project, it can be hard to get past the thoughts of to-do lists, the next day’s plans, or upcoming deadlines—instead of getting to sleep. Meditation is a great addition to a before-bed routine. Focusing on my breath and waiting for the change in my heart rate can help me drift right off to sleep with ease.

If you’re interested in starting a meditation practice, I highly recommend calm.com and their app (as a customer, not an advertiser!). Have you tried meditating? What tools do you like?

Daily Rituals

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One of the best and most immediate perks of giving up my corporate job was that I could stop setting my alarm. I’ve always struggled with getting up in the morning: no matter what time I go to bed or how long (or how well) I sleep, I’m always happy to stay in bed a little longer. The snooze button and I have a close, personal relationship. I really hated having to be somewhere at 7, 8, or 9:00—especially if I was expected to wear business casual clothes and more than a swipe of mascara.

The routines of artists

red book cover for Daily Rituals by Mason Currey

But left to my own devices this summer, the pendulum swung the other way. Having no routine has made me feel anxious about how I’m getting things done and guilty for eschewing all structure in my day. As I started trying to come up with the perfect daily agenda, I found the book Daily Rituals: How Artists Work from Mason Currey. He compiled the daily routines of writers, composers, painters, choreographers, philosophers, filmmakers, and scientists—often in their own words. It’s a wonderful and interesting collection of insights.

Some wake at 4:00 in the morning, others at noon. Some follow a minute-by-minute routine and others let their intuition guide them. Charles Dickens went for “a vigorous three-hour walk through the countryside or the streets of London” ever day promptly at 2:00. Truman Capote only wrote while lying down, always with a cup of coffee and a cigarette . . . shifting from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis as the day progressed.

It turns out there’s no one schedule that defines the creation of good and important work. I still haven’t decided on a routine that works for me, but I’m slowly carving one out. So far it includes making the bed as soon as possible, finding a half hour for a walk, leaving my phone in the other room when I’m writing, and still not setting an alarm. I’ve decided I don’t care whether I wake up with the dawn or just in time for lunch.

What about you? Do you have a particular routine or ritual?

Page 2

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I’ve had “start a blog” on my to-do list for approximately 11 months. As a person who likes to write, who likes to fancy herself a little bit witty and/or interesting, and who has recently started a freaking writing business . . . it seems like a totally reasonable thing to be doing. But I’m terrified of first pages.

The fear of starting

When I start any kind of paper-bound project, and I’ve been doing this for years, I start on page two. Diaries, food trackers, notebooks for classes, bullet journals, blank calendars. I leave that first page blank on all of them and start on the second one. I’m not sure if it’s a fear of imperfection or just of starting, but there’s just a little less pressure after I flip past the first page.

I suppose I’ve avoided a blog because there isn’t a way to avoid that on-screen. I just have to start and hope that I don’t later feel compelled to come back and slide some kind of explanation in front: “What you’re about to read is a bunch of drivel and my apologies in advance.”

Start anyway

But if I’ve learned anything this year, it’s that good stuff happens when you commit to taking leaps. I suspect that anyone reading this post is likely to already know a good bit about me—which is probably true of most First Blog Posts—but here’s my quick introduction anyway:

I’m the 30-something owner of Mallory Herrmann Editorial Services LLC. I live in the Kansas City area with my sweet husband of nearly four months and our (mostly sweet) cat Hot Dog. I’m a lifelong reader and writer with a knack for finding subject-verb disagreement and an insistence on using the Oxford comma. I’ve been writing and helping writers for a decade, and I made the leap into full-time self-employment earlier this year. This is my first (and hopefully not last) blog.