Living With Praise

In the seven years I’ve been broadcasting commentaries for Vermont Public Radio, I can’t tell you how many people have reached out to me by phone, email, or in passing, to tell me how much they liked one my pieces they heard. Often, I’ll post a link to a commentary on Facebook and friends will “like” it; sometimes, it will even be shared. Occasionally, strangers I meet treat me like a celebrity because they’ve heard me on the radio. The attention is very flattering, of course, and I’m genuinely pleased when someone praises me for saying something unusual and/or unpopular. That’s when I feel I’m doing my job, being a writer. Why then, do I remember exactly the number of emails I’ve received taking me to task?

Two.

One was a letter sent in to the station complaining about a pro-hunting piece I’d aired years ago. More recently, a listener complained about a piece I wrote about wearing recycled clothes.

That I can remember these listeners’ complaints practically verbatim but can’t remember the details from the hundreds of listeners who’ve emailed me with kudos tells me how much harder it is to hold on to praise. It also tells me how penetrating anger can be.

There’s no question: I hit a nerve, causing two listeners to hit their keyboards and spit venom at me. I tell myself that’s good, that I ‘got to them’ and isn’t that the purpose of writing? Maybe. But it burns.

In retaliation, I’ve parsed these letters and found gaping holes in logic and grammar, and located the places where they’ve misunderstood what I said, misrepresented it, or simply disregarded it. I’ve worked over my poison-pen replies (never written, never sent), and churned and burned in anger and disdain. In time, however, the anger dies down, leaving me to wonder why it is that criticism smarts in far greater proportion than praise.

I’ve received a thousand-fold more praises for my work, but I’ve given them less attention. Why is that? Why is it that I give negative sentiment more weight than positive feedback?

The only answer I can come up with is: That’s the way I’ve been trained.

And if it’s just a matter of training, then I can be retrained.

The need to retrain myself, to really pay attention to what my readers and listeners have to say became apparent when Into the Wilderness came out. Strangers wrote me personal letters, sent me emails, told me their stories and sought my advice. That experience taught me how wonderful it is to reach an audience I’m only vaguely aware of while I’m head down at my desk, trying to channel my thoughts into words against deadline. As a result, I vowed that when I read something that moved me, I’d send the author a note.

I also vowed to thank readers who’ve taken the trouble not just to read what I write, but to tell me about it – tell me what I wrote made them think or feel, maybe how it gave them hope or inspiration. And I’m no longer speaking of praise just for my radio commentaries, or my novel, or my newspaper columns, but also about the feedback I get from this blog. I’m generally and genuinely overwhelmed and overjoyed by the replies to these posts.

Ultimately, what thinking about my disproportionate reaction has been to criticism versus praise has shown me is that I must reverse how I respond to the two and give more attention – and more acknowledgement – to praise.

photo: M. Shafer

Deborah Lee Luskin is a novelist, essayist and educator. She lives in southern Vermont.

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Celebrate when you hit business goals and milestones

As a small business owner, it’s easy to get caught up in keeping the business moving forward.

You can always:

• be looking for the next client
• want to keep the best clients coming back
• spend time marketing
• connect with your market on social media
• build a support network
• spend time analyzing results
• get ‘caught up’ in deadlines

As a small business owner, you wear all the hats, juggle all the balls, keep everything moving forward. When you complete a task, you check it off and move on to the next item.

Similarly, when you hit a deadline, it’s easy to check it off your list and move on to the next project, but I think it’s important to pause and celebrate.

And before you say, “I don’t have time,” I disagree. At a minimum, I hope you’ll note the successful deadline completion in your list of accomplishments for the year. Whether it’s a success/achievement journal or a list taped to your wall, list the date and a brief description of the accomplishment.

For example: 4/20 – met deadline for (brief description of project) for (client      name) ahead of schedule/on time.

That’s the first activity I recommend. The next is to step away from your desk. Yep, don’t just push the chair back, actually get away from the keyboard so you won’t be tempted to work.

Take a moment to think about how the project arrived at your desk.

• Did you meet the client at an event? Pat yourself on the back for having made the connection that led to work.
• Did the client contact you through a referral? Congratulate yourself for having someone recommend you so positively.
• Did the client find you online? Give yourself kudos for your online marketing and social media efforts

Now think about the process of landing the project. Celebrate your successes of:

• Connecting with the client in a personal and professional way that resonated with the client
• Having your pitch/proposal accepted
• Being able to work with their deadline and other project parameters

And now that you’ve submitted the final work to the client, you get to celebrate the accomplishment, which is not something that happened over night. Recognize that. Appreciate it.

A different kind of celebration, but still a celebration

You’ve put in the effort and time, so take a few minutes, at least, to celebrate that fact! The ‘work’ itself may be easy to you, but that alone doesn’t make your business successful. YOU make your business successful with a lot of effort, so appreciate that and recognize it. (I’m repetitive with important points).

Talk out loud to the empty room: “I just finished X’s 2-week project and it feels GREAT!” (give your best Tony the Tiger imitation) “I look forward to more projects from X, and from similar clients I haven’t met yet.”

–As a note, yes, I do these things. I even do a happy dance – sometimes with music, sometimes without – to celebrate. There’s an exaggerated fist pump and a loud “YES!”, too. And laughter, because it *is* funny to be doing these things in an empty room. But it’s good – it’s fun – it’s celebrating – it makes me smile. I love to smile.

I believe that the more you can appreciate what you have, the more you’ll have. Business goals and milestones are worth celebrating.

And there’s another bonus to the celebrating: when you sit back at your desk to get back to work, you’ll feel more energized and have a fresh mind for the next project.

Have you been taking the time to appreciate all that you do for your business?

Lisa J. Jackson partners with businesses seeking to express themselves with words. She loves New Hampshire and is completing several 5Ks in 2013 as a way to get off the couch and away from the screen. She wasn’t a runner until now, and is thinking that someday she wants to complete the Alcatraz Triathlon. You can connect with her on LinkedIn, Biznik, Facebook, and Twitter. 

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Secrets of Successful Freelance Writers – Part 2 of 2

In the first part of Secrets of Successful Freelance Writers, we talked about the importance of finding the right work, learning to accurately price writing projects, and releasing your inner project manager. In today’s post, we tackle four more secrets that can help you build the freelance writing business of your dreams so you can make money from home … in your pajamas.

Here we go!

Study your craft.

You will never be done learning about writing. Whether your goal is to write feature articles or marketing copy, there is an infinite collection of resources and references that will help you hone your craft. From traditional books to blogs, online courses to community college courses, mentorships to internships, there are literally hundreds of ways to improve your skills and confidence.

In my case, I leaned heavily towards online sources. I became a voracious blog reader, devouring post after post, storing choice bits in my Evernote files, and putting my new skills to work as quickly as I could (lest I forget them). You can self-educate however you prefer, but don’t ever stop being hungry for more knowledge.

ACTION ITEMS:

• Do a search for blogs on your particular area of interest. Load a few into a reader (with Google Reader closing in July, I just switched to Feedly and I’m loving it!). Read them regularly.
• A great initial resource for anyone considering life as a freelance writer, Peter Bowerman’s Well-Fed Writer series are a perennial favorite – chock full of great advice and helpful templates.

Create your system.

There’s a reason that the assembly line had such an impact on the industrial revolution. Systems help you replicate and streamline a process so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel each time you tackle a particular task.

In addition to being more efficient, systems give you and your clients a greater sense of confidence. You know how to break a project down so you can get it down. Your clients feel like they are in capable hands when you have a clear and defined plan to get them from Point A to Point B.

Like pricing, expertise with creating systems will come with time and practice; but you can get a good head start by studying other people’s systems and thinking consciously about what works well on your projects.

ACTION ITEMS:

• Keep a running log of the steps you take to manage a project. After only a few times doing this exercise, you’ll begin to see patterns for what works and what doesn’t.
• Formalize your system by giving each phase a name. Familiarize yourself with the optimal flow for a project and then share that with your client as you work through the process.

Pay attention to the details.

They say don’t sweat the small stuff. When it comes to writing, I disagree. In writing, you’re better off remembering that the devil is in the details.

In a perfect world, we’d each have our own private editor who would proof and polish our work for us before we release it to the client. However, this isn’t a perfect world, so that’s not usually possible. There are, however, two tricks you can use to help improve the quality of your work.

First, build “breathing room” into your development schedule. Too often, we are rushed. We write right up to the deadline and have to send our work out without giving ourselves time to walk away for a little while and then come back with a fresh eye. Whenever possible, make sure to give yourself enough wiggle room to let your copy “set” for twenty-four hours. You’ll be amazed at how many improvements you’ll be able to easily make even after that short a respite.

Second, read your work out loud. There are lots of things that look good on paper, but sound lousy when spoken aloud. Reading your work out loud makes it obvious when a certain word or phrase doesn’t work. Never skip this step.

ACTION ITEMS:

• To convince yourself of the efficacy of these tactics, go back to a piece you wrote a while ago. First, edit it just on paper and then read it aloud and edit it again.
• Adjust the list of tasks and template schedule you created to include “breathing room.”

Provide over-the-top service.

Finally, nothing strengthens your business like stellar service.

When you engage with clients, try to make the experience fun. Smile even if you’re meeting via conference call (people can hear smiles, you know). Keep a positive and upbeat mood. Be responsive to customer inquiries. Be a true collaborator. Be polite and helpful and respectful. Go the extra mile.

One of the best things you can do for any customer is make her life easier. Whether your clientele is made up of corporate marketing managers or solo entrepreneurs, everyone loves to work with someone who makes the work easy. Find little ways to take things off your customer’s plate. Become an irreplaceable resource.

ACTION ITEMS:

• Think about the types of customer service experiences that have wowed you. How can you incorporate some of those types of experiences into your own workflow?
• Then think about the worst service experiences you’ve had. How can you ensure that you never make those mistakes with your customers?

So, there you have them – my seven favorite tips for becoming a successful freelance writer. So far, they have served me well. I hope they will do the same for you.

Questions? Lay ‘em on me and I’ll do my best to answer them.

More tips? Don’t just sit there – share! 

Jamie Lee Wallace is a writer who also happens to be a marketer. She helps her Suddenly Marketing clients discover their voice, connect with their audience, and find their marketing groove. She is also a mom, a prolific blogger, and a student of voice and trapeze (not at the same time). Introduce yourself on facebook or twitter. She doesn’t bite … usually.

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Image Credit: seeveeaar

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What Do You Do?

            When you meet someone for the first time, how do you reply to their inevitable question, “What do you do?”

When I held my first jobs, I was always excited to reply with my newly acquired title. “I’m an editorial assistant,” I said, straight out of college. “I teach writing,” I said, in graduate school. “I’m a research assistant,” I proclaimed, when I landed that job.

But when I chose to forgo a non-academic path in order to write, I also took some jobs that had nothing to do with writing and everything to do with supporting my family, like managing a medical practice.

During those years, when someone asked, “What do you do?” I still said, “I’m a writer.”

“Oh, really? What do you write?”

“Grocery lists,” I wanted to say, because, in truth, I wasn’t earning money from my pen and I still hadn’t published a novel. But I was writing editorial columns, so I’d talk about my published credentials, saying nothing about the half-dozen short stories and notes for novels I produced in secret silence on my own time.

That’s when I realized that when someone asks, “What do you do?” they usually want to know the boring details about how you earn money. For a while, I answered, “I manage a medical practice.” On less charitable days, I’d come right out with, “What do you really want to know, what I do or how do I earn money?”

This snappy riposte would only afford me momentary pleasure, because it then forced me to acknowledge that I wasn’t making any money doing the one thing that was most important to me – sometimes even more important than my family. Shocking, but true.

At about this point in life, I decided to try earning money by writing – and I did. I especially liked the assignments I found translating medical texts into language an ordinary person could understand; these jobs were both interesting and lucrative. But being a pen-for-hire was no different from office management in that it still ate up the limited time that I had while the kids were in school, leaving me gasping for time to write fiction.

At some point, I wizened up or gained courage or both, and when someone asked me, “What do you do?” I replied, “I’m a writer.”

“Really? What do you write?”

By then, I’d drafted two novels. “I’m a novelist,” I said, daring anyone to contradict my accomplishment.

“Best sellers?”

“Not published.” I replied, with a fair measure of defiance.

From there, it would be a toss-up which way the conversation would continue, from, “I’ve got a book I’d like to write,” to “I know someone who got a six-figure advance.” This is when I’d resist the urge to kick this person in the shins by walking away, steam visibly escaping from my ears.

But with practice and patience, I’m learning that money is not the only way to measure the value of what I do. After all, tax credits for dependent children aside, I’ve never been paid to raise children either, yet I have no trouble understanding that parenting is a valuable, even patriotic, job.

Money is only one measure of value, albeit one our culture is obsessed with. Not me. I’m obsessed with language and stories, so I’m starting to measure my success as a writer in number of words written and published rather than dollars earned with my pen.

Sure, in an ideal world I’d be able to earn a living as an essayist and novelist. Hopefully, someday I will. And why not? Every year, I write more, publish more, earn more. If I keep at it, I have a chance of achieving this goal; if I give up, I don’t.

So, I’m going to continue writing essays and novels; it’s work that I value, even if that value isn’t in dollars and cents. And since I spend my days writing, I’ve decided from now on to answer that question, “What do you do,” honestly. I’m going to tell anyone who asks what I actually do for the better part of each day. From now on, when someone asks me, “What do you do?” I’ll tell them the truth.

“I write,” I’ll say.

It’s what I do every day.

So, what do you do?

 

 

photo: M. Shafer

 

Deborah Lee Luskin is an award-winning novelist who writes in and about Vermont.

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Empowering Submission – guest post by Naomi Shafer

Regular Live to Write – Write to Live blogger Deborah Lee Luskin recently posted Raising a Writer. Here’s a post by that young writer, who by changing the language, offers a new way to think about sending work out.

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It’s hard to get excited about submitting. Submission Opportunity sounds dirty. As a twenty-three year old, just starting out, I have far too many opportunities to submit in my personal and professional life. And I work in a literary office, so I know the odds: they’re grim. But working on the other end of the submission spectrum has offered me a new perspective: as much as I’d like to believe that the gatekeepers to literary success are ogres, this job has taught me that the opposite is true. Each work is read with compassion and dedication, read by people who have dedicated their lives to soliciting new work. So, regardless of whether I like the lingo or not, to assert myself as a writer, I have to bite the linguistic bullet and submit my work.

I offer this: Instead of submitting to a competition, agent, or publisher, submit for. Submit for the opportunity to start something new, to clear your head, to know the draft is done.  Submit for the personal satisfaction of having done your best. Or, if you really need to spin it, submit for the person who will read it, for the opportunity to share your work with a stranger, to make someone else’s day a little less lonely. Because it will. Reading new work gives me hope to know that there are so many writers brave enough to share their work.

My evaluation is only one step in the process of how work is chosen. I can’t guarantee anything, certainly not fame or fortune, but what I can give each writer is my undivided attention while reading her work. I step into the world she has created and then ask what it taught me about myself. That’s a gift I can never repay, certainly not one that can be quantified with a royalty check. The authors who crafted these stories may never receive validation from my office (although many, even those not selected, do), but their characters step away from the page and inhabit my day. Some of them accompany home and keep me smiling all week. Others visit unexpectedly, months later, and remind me the enduring power of stories.

Submitting your work is an act of generosity. You give someone the chance to read a story they’d never heard before. And you create an audience, even if it’s only one person. Now, my submission is empowered with the knowledge that my work will be read. For now, that’s enough. . . But still really hard.

I’ve made a submission schedule with the goal that the more I practice it, the less scary it will become; submitting my work will feel less like submitting my whole self. The added perk is that the schedule keeps me moving forward.  Having an outside deadline helps for the days I’d prefer to clean my toilet than write. And sometimes it’s fun to write within parameters I wouldn’t have thought of for myself.

But it’s not foolproof. This past month I chickened out.  Frustrated by the contest I should have heard back from weeks ago, I let myself slump. Then, angry at the judges for not giving me the courtesy of a response, I invited six friends over to read the play I’d submitted. I was one chair short. My attempt at gluten-free baking was a catastrophe. But the play came to life. Best of all, I got feedback and encouragement from the people I care about most. It taught me that there will be other opportunities for this play, ones I can make for myself.

And in the meantime, I remind myself that each work I submit is a gift for the person lucky enough to read it.

How do you get yourself to submit your work?

Naomi Shafer is a Dramaturgy/Literary Management Intern at the Actors Theatre of Louisville, where her play Lucid is about to premiere in a festival of short plays. She is the editor of the Intern Company Blog and a contributing writer for inside Actors, the theatre’s newsletter. Shafer holds a B.A. in Sociology and Theatre from Middlebury College.

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Raising a Writer

           My middle child is a playwright.

If I were a responsible parent, I’d probably discourage her from pursuing a career in the arts, unless she were to go into arts management, where she could be regularly underpaid instead of intermittently so. Because face it: as much as we lionize successful artists in our culture, we don’t do much to support them on their way. And by “successful” we usually mean wealthy and/or famous, preferably both.

But as a writer who deferred my own writing for a large segment of my life, I’m encouraging my daughter to arrange her life so that she can capture the stories that rattle through her head. This may be socially and financially risky, but I know the rage that comes from disregarding the voice, the gift.

If I do nothing else than tell her every day that what she has to say is important, that her voice matters to the world, I’m doing my job.

I know I’m reacting to what I didn’t get. My parents had no experience raising a writer, or supporting one. And I’m not talking money. I’m talking belief.

Because I knew, on some level, my parents didn’t believe in me as a writer the way they believed in me as a scholar, literary critic, and educator (jobs with regular paychecks), I never showed them my work until it was published. I took their cue, and marginalized this most important element of my life. It’s taken me most of a lifetime to overcome this learned doubt, and I may have missed my chance. But I have a new chance, a chance to help my daughter with the support I wish I’d had.

She’s already enjoying some success, with two staged readings of a full-length play and a full production of a ten-minute piece. At age 23, she’s already earned her first royalty check. (See? I can’t keep money out of this equation.)

These successes are the end results of real work, work she does before and after she goes to her job – a prestigious but underpaid internship as a dramaturge at one of the country’s preeminent theaters for new American work. She’s learning and making connections in the industry during the day, and she’s going home to write at night.

She’s living well below the poverty level, but if she takes even a low-paying job, she won’t have time to write. So we’ve made a deal. I’m paying her to write: $5/hour for seventeen hours/week. In addition to writing, she sends me a list of contests and submission deadlines she plans to meet.

She’s not going to get rich off me; she will get a lot written, and she’ll be able to pay her rent.

How do you support your writing? What’s the bare minimum you need? How can you arrange your life so that you can write and survive?

Deborah Lee Luskin is a novelist, essayist and educator. She lives in southern Vermont, and can also be found on the web at www.deborahleeluskin.com

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Benefits of a success/achievement journal

Do you have a success journal? Are you writing in it regularly? Do you know what a success (or achievement) journal is?

It can be a small notebook, a sticky pad, a bookmark with blank lines, anything that will allow you to keep track of daily, weekly, and monthly accomplishments. A success journal is a useful way for any self-employed writer to stay on top of daily, weekly, and monthly goals.

By having the goals written out each week (I do my weekly list of goals on Sunday nights), it’s easy to not only check off the tasks as they are accomplished, but it’s easy to list some of the ones that took extra effort, as successes.

As 2012 comes to an end, I admit that I haven’t kept my list of successes up-to-date on a regular basis. In fact, I don’t even have a journal per se.

I use the Planner Pad system for my tasks, goals, and calendar and use the far right Notes/Calls column to track successes and wins I’ve had. I actually have it renamed as “accomplishments,” but that’s semantics.

Just as I see the value in keeping a gratitude journal (listing 5 things a day I’m thankful (or grateful) for that day),  keeping successes / accomplishments/wins in front of my mind is also quite beneficial.

I have weekly writing goals, and love being able to note new blog posts, new magazine or newspaper assignments, or new clients as successes. I also have marketing goals (and related successes), editing goals (as part of my freelance business is editing), as well as fitness goals.

Noting successes (and a success is something different for each of us) in one location for the entire year allows for an easy review at year’s end.

By having all my accomplishments listed in one place, I can easily pull a 12-month list together. And I have to tell you, it is quite a rush to see how much I’ve done in 12 months. I love it when I go back to review the early months and see my successes. It’s like being given a gift all over again because in most cases, I’ve forgotten those successes in the passing of time.

If you haven’t started a success journal yet, I recommend starting now. And then a year from now, go back through it and see what you’ve done. It’s a great motivator and an inspiring kick in the butt — it’s also useful to do in December if you set goals for the coming year at this time.

Success breeds success. And once you review what you accomplished in 2012, your goals for 2013 will be higher than you imagined. In fact, it’s a good way to start your list of Wildly Improbably Goals like Diane talked about last week.

Do you keep track of your accomplishments / achievements / successes / wins? 

Lisa J. Jackson is a New England-region journalist and a year-round chocolate and iced coffee lover. She loves working with words, and helping others with their own. As Lisa Haselton, she writes fiction, co-blogs about mystery-related writing topics at Pen, Ink, and Crimes, has an award-winning blog for book reviews and author interviews, and is a chat moderator at The Writer’s Chatroom. Connect with her on LinkedIn, Facebook, or Twitter. 

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Winning at NaNoWriMo

          It’s November twenty-seventh, meaning including today there are just four more days to finish the NaNoWriMo challenge of writing a 50,000-word novel in one short month. As of this morning, I’m at 42,452, so it’s nip-and-tuck whether I’ll cross the finish line in time, but in my view, I’ve already won.

When I first heard of Nanowrimo a few years ago, I thought it was for amateurs. Then this year, I signed up because I needed a push. I got just what I asked for: incentive to sit at my desk and write daily, advancing the novel I’ve been working on for years.

What I’ve written isn’t a novel yet, but it’s part of a wonderful first draft that resembles a slightly overweight, middle-aged woman: blousy and untucked, hem crooked, lipstick wearing off, a bit florid in the face. Roots visible. Flabby, untoned, maybe even intoxicated, certainly out of breath – and very, very happy. At least I am.

What I have now is a fabulous mess. Oh, it started out a bit more controlled, just as I started out ahead of the curve, writing 2,000 words/day at the start of the month. But I knew what was coming: a trip that took me out-of-town for a week, followed by a week of preparing and celebrating Thanksgiving with a dozen house guests.

Given these major distractions, it’s no wonder I fell behind. But I didn’t give up. And that’s the magic.

So whether I cross the 50,000-word finish line this Friday or not, I consider myself a winner, big-time. Here’s a partial list of my prizes:

• The knowledge that I can write fast when I need to;
• I can write early in the morning, before the house wakes;
• I can write at the airport, while waiting for my plane;
• I can write in bed, before sleep, if I have to.
• I can mark places in the text that I’ll have to go back to and check facts later – and not stop to do research (i.e. procrastinate).
• I can spill ink, blood, sweat and tears on the page without worry,
• Because I’ll have plenty of time to clean up the draft as I rewrite it
• Again
• And again.

If my nano-novel is like a blousy woman, then that makes me a personal trainer who’s looking forward to the next phase, after the rough draft is finished. That’s when I’ll work her hard to get her into shape. I’ll help her lose words, tighten her prose, improve the condition of her characters, take hours off her plot, and make her something to look at.

Did you attempt Nanowrimo this month? If so, what did you learn about yourself as a writer?

Deborah Lee Luskin is a novelist, essayist and educator. Listen to her Vermont Public Radio broadcast about NaNoWriMo here. Learn more at www.deborahleeluskin.com

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The Scientist Writes

Regular Live to Write – Write to Live blogger Deborah Lee Luskin wrote Most Improved Writing Student earlier this month.

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Here’s a guest post by that student, Daniel Chamovitz, author of What A Plant Knows

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I don’t consider myself an author; I am a scientist. I spend my days and nights considering levels of gene expression, pondering the intricacies of protein structure, and guiding my students on their nascent scientific paths. A fair amount of academic administrative duties and a heavy, but immensely satisfying, load of lecturing fill out my schedule. And when all this is finished, I still have endless grant proposals, reports, reviews and articles to write.

But I wasn’t invited to last month’s Brattleboro Literary Festival because of my academic record; I was invited as the author my recent book, What A Plant Knows.

What brings a scientist to lay down the pipette and pickup the pen?

My impetus in writing a trade book was twofold: First, I wanted to educate. I get endlessly annoyed at public ignorance of science in general and of plant biology in particular. While many people I speak to are surprised to discover that plants contain the gene for breast cancer, they have no problem in quoting the scientifically lame book, The Secret Life of Plants, and believing that plants don’t like to be yelled at. But I came to realize that my colleagues and I are partially responsible for this ignorance, as we have done a pitiful job extolling the wonders of plant biology.

Scientists from other fields have greatly influenced public perception through their books: Hawking has done a great service to astrophysics with A Brief History of Time; Dawkins explains evolution in The Selfish Gene, and mathematics is brought to life in Simon Singh’s Feremat’s Last Theorem. Perhaps arrogantly, I set out to write the plant version of these wonderful books, a book that would open the amazing world of plant science to the general public.

Second, for years I’ve had a secret desire to write something that was popular, and not strictly and professionally scientific. While much of my success as a scientist has been due to my writing ability, that writing – of grant proposals and research articles – is very structured and repetitive, and admittedly reaches a very limited audience. Could I go beyond the secure world of professional scientific writing? Could I take this skill one step forward and write something that would be both interesting and intelligible to a non-scientist?

I quickly learned that the literary world is not so different from my world of academic science. Success in science is not only a function of intelligence, but also of diligence, deferred gratification, risk taking, and an ability to know when to learn from – and when to ignore – rejection.

Success in science is also influenced by serendipity – just as in publishing.

Once I made the commitment to writing a trade book, I knew that I had to find an agent to reach a broad audience. Having no idea how to find an agent, I looked in the “Acknowledgments” of the last two books I read, to identify the agents who had sold them. The rest is an author fairy-tale: One query letter and 22 months later: a published book!

Now four months post-publication, a rush of publicity events, and wonderfully kind words from new friends and readers, and I’m back in my lab. I have a 10,000-word grant proposal due next week, two new scientific manuscripts to write, and a new course to teach. But in the back of my mind I’m working out the general shape of a new book proposal based on an idea inspired by my visit to Vermont. Maybe publishing and science are similar in another way as well – both are addictive.

Daniel Chamovitz, Ph.D., is the Director of the Manna Center for Plant Biosciences at Tel Aviv University. He studied at both Columbia University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received his Ph.D. in Genetics. He has lectured at major universities around the world. www.danielchamovitz.com

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Most Improved Writing Student

In 1982, while a graduate student at Columbia University, I taught Introduction to Freshman Composition, a remedial course for bright but inarticulate young men just entering the college. (Columbia was still all-male back then.) I’d never taken Freshman Composition of any kind, so I found the class useful and interesting. Indeed, I developed an appreciation for fluid non-fiction as a result of the class, and the skills that I learned by teaching have served me well. For even though my heart lies in writing literary fiction, my bank account depends on my ability to write clear, expository, prose.

I earned my PhD and moved to Vermont, creating a free-lance career outside the academic mainstream. I lost touch with all my students and most of my colleagues from my New York days – until 2009.  That’s when I received an email from a former student, who wrote to thank me for my tutelage.

Daniel Chamovitz, that former student, is now a professor of biology at Tel Aviv University, where among other classes, he teaches a course called “Scientific Writing in English for PhD Students”. In his letter, he explained how a student had asked him how he learned to write, prompting him to remember the C- I gave him for what he now says, “was, in retrospect, a very pitiful piece of work.”

In his long and lovely letter, he says that his success as a scientist is due as much to his writing skills as it is to any scientific achievements. It concludes with thanks “for the path you started me on.” I never dreamed I’d had such an impact on any of those young men, let alone such a positive one that would be remembered three decades later.

Of course I replied, and we’ve maintained the correspondence. When we met in 1982, Danny was a mere 18 to my mature 24. Now, that six-year gap seems insignificant. (My youngest child and his oldest are the same age.) But best of all, we’re now both authors. Danny’s book, What A Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses of Your Garden – and Beyond, was just published in a joint venture between Scientific American and FSG. And Danny is coming to read from it at this year’s Brattleboro Literary Festival.

The 2012 Brattleboro Literary Festival takes place October 12-14. It’s a fabulous way to spend a weekend in downtown Brattleboro, Vermont, a gateway community with a vibrant literary and arts economy – and really good food – in the southeast corner of the state.

I go every year. Hearing authors read aloud is a treat; meeting them is a thrill; talking books with other book-lovers a great way to spend a weekend. And this year, on Saturday afternoon, I’ll be introducing my former C- student, whose book, What A Plant Knows deserves an A+.

Deborah Lee Luskin is novelist, essayist and educator. She is a regular commentator for Vermont Public Radio, a Visiting Scholar for the Vermont Humanities Council and the author of the award winning novel, Into The Wilderness. For more information, visit her website at www.deborahleeluskin.com

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