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Author offers concrete tips for aspiring writers: routines, journals, writing groups and markets
Summary
Jeanette advised aspiring writers to keep daily free-writing journals, join critique groups, treat magazines as entry points, and protect morning writing time from interruptions.
At a Missoula talk, Jeanette shared practical, experience-based advice for writers trying to publish, stressing daily free writing, critique groups and realistic expectations about markets and rights.
"How many of y'all keep journals? Any of you?" she asked rhetorically before describing her own routine: she writes free for 10–15 minutes each morning, prints the week's pages on Friday and stores them as a resource for scenes and characters. "If no other idea comes to me, I can go out and read my own unused, unused stuff," she said.
She described working with a writing group of "7 or 8" peers who read and critique work every couple of weeks and credited them for practical, targeted suggestions. She also recounted an in-home exercise — printing a novel, cutting chapters into half sheets and color-coding threads — that helped her spot balance problems and dropped subplots.
On markets, Jeanette recommended magazines as an entry route for young writers but cautioned that many magazines buy "all rights," which transfers ownership of a short piece to the publisher. She said selling short fiction can be easier than selling a book but that magazines often limit a writer's future use of that work.
She closed with time-management tips: protect early-morning writing hours (turn off phones and answering machines), start each session by re-reading the previous day's work to slip back into character, and accept that some days produce nothing but routine work that still primes productivity.
