Check your facts. You might not be Brian Williams. Maybe you don’t plan to write a memoir about your experience in the war against terrorism, cancer, death, or addiction. If you are a professional writer, you need to know facts still matter. Especially to your readers. If you write nonfiction, your credibility as an author depends on it. Corroborate your facts with additional documentation. Immerse yourself in the evidence. The author is responsible for any factual errors and you don’t want to be embarrassed or discredited. This is not the kind of controversy which sells books. Forces publishers to pull them from the shelves and eat crow. So what are the most common tools I recommend to nonfiction writers for fact checking? Lmgtfy.com Let Me Google That For You. It’s true. There is no magic key. It’s all in your keywords. What’s your question? What did they use the iron lung for in treating tuberculosis? What’s the word to describe the science of vineyards and grapes? My mom said she wore saddle shoes but would they have made them and sold them in 1942 in Minnesota? What was the weather like the day I was born? Whenever you are writing about in first-person you face the dangers of relying on memory alone. Start with a list of words and phrases specific to your project. Choose 10-12 terms and update the list once a month. These keywords are specific to the subject of your work. Names, Places, Events, Topics. With a…

If there were some easy ways to be more productive as a writer, would you want to know about them? If so, read on. “I write only when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.” —W. Somerset Maugham In the above quote, Maugham is getting at one of the critical distinctions between professional working writers and, well, everyone else (which here includes students, hobbyists, people who don’t write at all, and those who approach you at parties, mildly drunk and grinning, to tell you that they hate writing because it’s too hard, but they’ve actually got THE MOST AMAZING IDEA EVER for a novel or screenplay – do you want to hear about it?). If you think of yourself as a working writer, or you aspire to that, then it’s worth considering the following seven hacks to help you be more productive: 1)  Separate writing into these distinct processes: WRITING: creating your narrative, finding the story, working through plot points, discovering character and voice, etc. EDITING: reading your work critically, and marking it the hell up REWRITING: taking your critical notes from editing, and rewriting to make your story stronger TYPING: if you’re able to write longhand, save the task of typing for days/times when you’re too exhausted to do anything else. It takes little thinking power, but still counts as writing. 2)  Pick one project and stick with it until it’s finished. Productivity suffers when writers flit from project to project. The good stuff always…

Learning how to become an editor doesn’t happen overnight. Editing isn’t a college major. Some English degree programs offer a specialization in editing and publishing, most do not. There are a handful of certificate programs in professional and graduate degree programs, but the art of editing goes far beyond knowing grammar and the basics of copyediting. A full-time job as an editor isn’t an entry-level position and many recent graduates who might one day become editors have a difficult time navigating a route to this career goal. Many publishers won’t hire someone full-time who hasn’t already had an internship or two. And while they offer internships, typically they are unpaid and sometimes require a student register for college course credit. Instead of getting paid to work, they pay several thousands of dollars in tuition to gain valuable work experience. As a former college professor who supervised some of these internships, I would be disheartened to learn students had been given low-level tasks to perform which did not increase their skill sets or worse, had them perform tasks which the company ought to have hired an employee to do. Too often, interns provided an unpaid labor pool instead of an apprenticeship. Cultivating the next generation of editors requires mentors who can offer educational opportunities within a workplace setting. Instead of treating an intern as unpaid labor, cultivating their strengths and working on building new skill sets takes time and effort that goes beyond the regular work demands of running a business.…