Essay Online

If you are a webmaster you will know that writing articles for publication in ezines is an excellent way to get free publicity for your website. One thing that holds many would be writers back is that they don’t think they will be able to find enough to write even on a subject they know well. Webmasters who have never written an article before tend to feel their minds go blank at the suggestion of writing for publication. One of the most common reasons for not writing articles is that people do not think they will be able to write enough about a topic. This worry is usually overcome during the writing process but, even if you run out of words too soon, there are a few useful tricks you can use to increase your word count.

Most article directories will not accept an article consisting of fewer than 500 words; the most suitable length for an article is between 500 and 700 words. Let’s go for 500 words for our first attempt. That might sound a lot but, if you look at the structure of most articles you will see that they are broken down into three sections: introductory paragraph, main content and closing paragraph. In turn, the main content will be broken down into 3-5 paragraphs.

If you plan your article to have three paragraphs of main content, you only need to find 100 words to write in each paragraph and that is a far easier goal to think about than finding 500 words. When you write the article, you obviously won’t have exactly 100 words in each paragraph but this rule of thumb gives you something to aim for. Decide in advance on the sub-topic of each of the main content paragraphs, you can give them subheadings if appropriate, otherwise just use the sub-topics to plan your structure.

To get a feel for structure, let’s look at an idea for an article. Our subject can be planting spring bulbs and our plan will look something like this:

Introduction - general information eg about types of bulbs available for spring flowering, type, varieties available, colors available, best time to plant, benefits of using bulbs in preference to other forms of planting.

Para 1 - choosing the right bulbs for particular situations eg shaded ground, containers, mixed planting, indoor displays etc.

Para 2 - planting techniques e.g. choosing growing medium for containers, choosing containers, depth to plant different species, color schemes

Para 3 - general care e.g. watering, when to cut down, propagation, naturalizing

Closing - brief summary of topics covered or something along the lines of “if you follow this care guidance, your bulbs will provide a colorful display year after year”.

In this plan our closing paragraph is very brief but there should be no problem in writing well over 100 words for the first paragraph. In fact, if you are a bulb expert, you could write several articles based on each of the sub-topics.

If you feel you need to write an article on a particular subject but really run out of things to say, there are a couple of simple ways to bring your word count up to the level required by the article directories. Make it a rule, however, that you never use artificial padding to inflate your word count. The trick is to add words that enhance the value of your article, not just puff it up. These are legitimate ways of boosting your word count:

1. Add a sub-title to the article and use sub headings (if appropriate) for each paragraph.

2. If you use acronyms or initials, place the full term in brackets after the abbreviation. eg if you are talking about PPC, add “(this stands for Pay Per Click advertising)” after the abbreviation to add seven extra words.

3. Use quotations or statistics. Some articles can be uplifted by the use of a famous quotation. Inserting the quotation and author name adds several words but you can expand this by adding a brief biographical note about the author eg “the famous Russian metaphysical poet”. If the article is not suited to the insertion of quotations, you might be able to add an interesting statistic. The information together with details of its source will add more words.

If you follow the steps set out above, you should find it comparatively easy to write an article of sufficient length for Ezine publication.

Once you have an idea for a book and a plan for how to get it written and marketed, it’s time to put your brain to work with some writing exercises. Here are 10 different tips to help your brain get the ‘WRITE’ idea:

• When an idea comes to you, usually unexpectedly, it is time to write

In today’s world of mass communications and widespread online shopping, it is relatively easy and simple to purchase everything you would like to buy online - from hundred years old antique books up to the last week’s bestsellers, from magazines of your local community up to the periodicals of other countries, clothes and apparels, sport equipment and electronics &ndash everything is sold on the internet.

But online shopping as any other modern development has two sides &ndash one is an easy and convenient service, another is the service where your security and privacy should be guarded. And, unlike shopping at the supermarket you might never receive what you have paid for.

This is especially true in essay-writing online business. Many of so &ndash called “American essay writing companies” are really located in developing countries and lure their gullible clients by blatant false, untruthful promises.

So when you buy the essay, dissertation or term paper on-line how can you make this process more safely and secure your financial information as well as your privacy? What steps should be taken?!

When you buy the term paper online, you should make sure that you are buying it from reputable and well-known essay writing service. One should always make some preliminary checks - first you should find out whether the company has valid address and the telephone number. As was mentioned earlier many of these companies are located in developing countries and if there is no vital telephone number or address than this is a strong indication that this company is not an American one.

Second, investigate the reputation of the company. Try to find out whether other people have had some problems with this company in the past.

When buying term paper, try to avoid the companies that intend to notify you about some new products in the future. Remember, that in this way your email address and other information might be shared either with other companies or other persons. If however you are requested to provide some personal information such as your security number or the number of your bank account, then you should exercise extreme caution. You should never disclose this information to any company; if the company demands it and claims that this information is a prerequisite for your purchase, then it might be advisable to buy your term paper at another site.

One should not give any additional information that deems private, and one should always remembers that it is a legitimate right of the customer to demand the guarantee that the data or any other information provided for verification purposes is not used besides the purposes mentioned. As a customer you should study privacy statement of the company very thoroughly to make sure that your privacy as well as your data is kept confidential. Sometimes, privacy statements of the company can be found under the headings “Terms and conditions” as well as “Terms of use”.

Despite the fact that responsibility lies on the company, it lies on your caution and attentiveness as well. You should only purchase over secure computer and server. Make sure that your browser supports 128bit encryption, In order to check out whether your server is secure one should pay attention to several details:

- The address https - is a clear indication that this site is secure.

- The presence of small locked padlock in the right part of the screen.

- And certainly, you should create a secure and long password, so it will not be possible to break it. Learn more about it here: buy term paper .

WHY WE LOVE STORIES

Tell me a story! Just one more story!

Okay, here’s one for you about a forty-six year old lawyer.

Harry’s stuck in the backroom of a creaky, old law firm and under his senior partner’s thumb. Life is going nowhere and his chances of making real money are fading fast. His wife plans to leave him because, she claims, they are ‘in different worlds.’ Wishing his life were different, he has no idea how to change it.

Next day his senior partner comes into to his office and drops dead. Soon a brand new client arrives to sucker him into a money-laundering scheme. Although highly principled, he has new money troubles and consequently turns a blind eye to the scam. [Be careful what you wish for.]

When he finds his elderly client dead, just after she has asked to change her will, [suspicious circumstances for sure!] he is forced to hunt down a serial killer, dubbed the Florist. To do so, he must go down into the psyche of this serial killer [and, more importantly, into his own] to understand this psychotic killer with an artistic flair. And he must stop him. Just as his wife is about to pack her bag, a beautiful woman, Natasha, comes to Harry’s aid.

At the end, Harry has discovered undreamed of powers within himself and this new woman, who actually loves him. And if that’s not enough, he’s laid waste to the Florist plus a corrupt firm of lawyers at the heart of the money-laundering scam.

What story is this?

It’s the story of Harry Jenkins in Conduct in Question, the first in the Osgoode Trilogy, which I wrote.

The hero, Harry Jenkins, also appears in Final Paradox and a Trial of One, the second and third novels in the trilogy.

Just click .maryemartin.com to learn more about Harry and see a slide show of settings in Conduct in Question.

After almost thirty years of law practice, why didn’t I write essays, setting out the machinations of money-launderers, replete with diagrams, statistics and charts? [Strange as it may sound, lawyers here can even take courses on money laundering.] I could have written about estate law and quoted sections of the Wills and Estates Act. But I bet you’d never read it.

Why not? Because you’d much rather hear a story, which brings all these problems to life, with exciting conflicts between good and evil and all the ‘in between’ shades of gray. Only with real characters acting upon one another do these problems jump off the page and get interesting. That’s why we tell stories.

In high school, many of us studied Greek Mythology -those fabulous stories about gods, goddesses and heroes. Tales of high adventure! But no one ever explained who made these stories and why. Where did they come from?

The great mythologist Joseph Campbell wrote in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that,

Myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestations…The symbols of mythology are not manufactured: they cannot be ordered, invented or permanently suppressed. They are spontaneous productions of the psyche and each bears within it, undamaged, the germ power of its source. [Pg 3&4]

Are myths, dreams and stories living ‘things’ springing up from within? So it seems, according to Campbell. For me, stories are the outpourings of our psyches from mysterious sources. Like dreams and myths, they are individually and collectively an expression of our deepest sense of what it means to be human.

But isn’t it interesting! Reading Joseph Campbell’s book, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, we learn that story formats and plot lines are also embedded in us. In so many myths, the hero is lifted out of his everyday life and called or forced to do something dangerous. Confronting tremendous obstacles [of a huge variety limited only by our imaginations], he must find help along the way and call upon powers within himself to reach his goal. Once he has reached it, he must return to his world with his prize. Isn’t that the basic plot of innumerable Hollywood action flicks?

Back to our lawyer. A lawyer as a hero? [I’m not joking!]

Events drive Harry from the dull safety of his usual life. Next, he is battling strange forces never confronted before. He discovers within previously unknown powers and abilities. Then he must return to his ‘normal’ life with the prize, a good woman and a new understanding of himself. And all the bad guys are gone! Sounds like a hero’s journey to me.

Did I purposely set out to write a hero’s journey? Hardly! Only after literally innumerable rewrites, did I begin to recognize that indeed, this was a tale of the hero’s journey. My point is that the hero’s journey and other variations are our innate grammar, language and structure for myths, dreams and stories. It is through them that we express our human ways of being.

All the big questions, which are fundamentally meaningful to us, are asked in stories. In a way, each story is about birth, growth, death and redemption. And so, it is through story telling that we satisfy our very human need to understand one another, our world and ourselves. At least that’s the way I see it. How about you?

Can a city be a character in a book? Many years ago, in a writing class, I was told that I should try to make the setting, which was Toronto, my city of birth, a character in my book, Conduct in Question. I have puzzled over this piece of advice for many years and only now think I may have an answer as to its meaning.

Here’s another question. Can the city you’ve lived in all your life be a character or does intimacy somehow disqualify it? I have often longed to see Toronto with the eyes of a visitor but unfortunately, that is surprisingly hard to do.

I was reading Alain De Botton’s delightful book, The Art of Travel. He maintains that when we travel, we adopt, if we are lucky, a traveler’s receptive mind-set. Somehow, we North Americans walking around Paris or Buenos Aires are much more open to what we see than if we were at home. We ask questions. We see these places with ‘fresh’ eyes and a sense of wonder. However, at home, says De Botton, we have become so habituated to our surroundings that we scarcely notice them.

So, how can a writer hope to make his own hometown an effective setting, [given his habituation] much less an interesting character? After all, if we are blind to our everyday surroundings, can we ever hope to see them with fresh eyes?

Perhaps the answer lies in the distinction between intimacy and familiarity. Intimacy with a lover suggests deep, unconscious involvement. Familiarity perhaps connotes staying on the surface with a case of borderline boredom. And so, intimacy with one’s home may suggest deep knowledge, not boredom.

I found a clue in reading Jan Morris, one of the world’s finest and most experienced travel writers. She gave Torontonians a ‘snapshot’ of their city in the early 1980’s. Here are some of the descriptive words she used. The people appeared calm, dispassionate, polite, determined, joyless, resigned and reticent. Wow! Who would want to visit us? Furthermore, the city is conducive to self-doubt and introspection. This does not sound like a great party place!

But she’s right, at least in part. Torontonians, on the surface, are notoriously reserved and polite to the extent of appearing cold, unfriendly and formal. But, as one who has lived a lifetime here, I’d argue that that is only part of the story.

If you’ve ever visited Toronto, you will know a bit about its geography. It sits on a huge body of water [Lake Ontario] and is riddled with ravines. These are gorgeous, deep cut chasms left in their state of nature. If you are walking along St Clair Avenue, in the middle of traffic, shops, offices and cafes, you could turn down a path at a bridge and find yourself in an entirely different world. Trees, bushes, shrubs, all manner of plant life await you along with the occasional skunk or fox. And it is amazingly quiet. The rumblings of traffic grow distant and at last you hear the songbirds. It’s a bit like achieving a different state of consciousness.

I love this image. Within a very short distance of the sleek, glistening towers of banks and businesses, the snarl of traffic, all creating an extraordinarily highly, polished surface, nature runs riot.

Doesn’t that make you think of what people are like? Each day, we dress up, putting on our public mask. And we submerge, for a time, all the mutinous rumblings of our inner selves. How like Toronto is to its people!

Last year, Conduct in Question [the first in the Osgoode Trilogy] was published. Harry Jenkins is the protagonist lawyer practicing in Toronto. On reflection, I have to admit that Harry is a lot like the city I’ve just been describing. At the beginning of Conduct in Question he is trapped in a creaky, old law firm under his senior partner’s thumb and in a dead marriage of twenty years. But mutinous rumblings lie within Harry. I’m in my late forties. Am I running out of time? Can I make more money? How much money is enough?

And, what do you know? Harry is reserved, reticent, introspective and subject to self-doubt. On the polished surface of life, things aren’t so bad, but something is missing. It takes murder and fraud [catapulted down into the wilds of the ravines] to burst open his life and get him really living again. In the second novel of the trilogy, Final Paradox, I got very interested in the role masks play in the lives of people. Harry is once again caught up in murder and fraud and this time the question is can love and forgiveness be found amid fraud and deceit? And so, [metaphorically speaking] Harry is thrust down into the ravines of his psyche to come up with the answers.

So, yes, I think I understand how a city [the setting] can become a character and also influence the other characters and themes in a novel. I’ve been greatly affected by the central image of Toronto with its polished, sophisticated surface contrasted with what lurks under the bridges. That image is what lies under the Osgoode Trilogy.

This is to say the least an interesting and entertaining read that covers far more ground than the title implies. Told with a huge amount of humor we follow Dodie on her sojourn to Thailand, where things do not work out as planned. As she ruefully reflects on in the final chapters, what seems like a great opportunity at the time, had enough flashing warning lights that she should have spotted early on.

The story opens with our heroine working a mundane office job during the day, and helping out part time at a local golf course in the evenings. Here she meets he husband to be, the club Pro Dick. Although not exactly swept off her feet in passion, they do eventually become lovers. It transpires that Dick prior to becoming a Golf Pro has had considerable experience in the construction world. Happenstance puts Dick and Dodie in a position where a two-year contract for a construction project in exotic Thailand is theirs for the taking. A free house, bags of tax free money, what more could you ask for? Of course there is one minor hitch, for Dick to get the full company benefits, he must be married.

Whats a fun loving, adventure seeking gal to do? Well if your name is Dodie Cross you of course get married, and start packing! Minor things like ‘love’ can be worked on later!

It doesn’t take our adventurous author long to discover that the ‘land of smiles’ may well be full of smiles, but the company compound where everyone must live is anything but Eden. A repressive management, or to be exact the manager’s wife, has created her own version of hell on Earth. Endless lists of rules and regulations, the company not only owns the employees, but their wives and families as well. Must-attend meetings, shopping trips, card games, and parties are all part of the social calendar.

None of this sits well with Dodie, and she of course decides to buck the system, even worse she discovers that Dick is a 60 year old sex maniac! Stress at home, stress from “the bosses,” all start to weigh heavily on Dodie, an unexpected medical problem also adds to her growing list of issues.

A Broad Abroad In Thailand is a great read, it is written in a very humorous style, I particularly enjoyed the Pigin English dialog with the local Thai people. That on its own makes this book a hit! Dodie, undaunted by minor and in some cases major setbacks,’bags and crashes’ her way through life. This is a must read book for anyone contemplating living and working in a foreign land, from marital to medical, the problems are so much greater than being at home.

About Dodie Cross: she is a freelance writer who has received numerous awards for her writing and poetry, among them the prestigious Southern California Writer’s Conference First Place Award for “Best Nonfiction,” as well as First Place in their inaugural Poetry Award. She has accrued first and second place prizes in her published articles. Dodie has traveled the world, writing about her life in foreign countries such as Iran and Thailand, as well as American locales such as New Orleans, Orange County, California and Lake Chelan, Washington. Look for her next book: One Strappy-Sandaled Foot Ahead of the Mullahs: An Expat’s Life in Iran Before and During the Revolution.

It’s interesting to look back at the origins of Cosmopolitan Magazine, seeing their first subscription numbers (in the 25,000) range, into what it has become now. Its almost amazing how the content has evolved over the years–from a one-time family magazine back in the late 19th century–to what is now; a demographic exclusive to females.

Before cosmopolitan magazine experienced world wide success, the initial founders and editors (Schlicht & Field) went out of business only 2 years after the company’s launch. Only after E.D. Walker, an ex editor for Harper’s Monthly purchased the rights to Cosmopolitan magazine did the business really take off. He didn’t settle for the old way of doing things, with an innovative sense he introduced book reviews, serial fiction, and color illustrations to the magazine.

Only 1 year later after Cosmopolitans booming popularity, E.D. Walker sold the company to John Brisben Walker, who quickly employed some of the nation’s top writers. He went on to open a free correspondence school, which he had to retract almost immediately after only 2 weeks more then 20,000 people signed up.

Cosmopolitan magazine was later sold to William Randolph Hearst in 1905. He began to expand the magazine by employing top writers, and investigative journalists. Some of the best articles written came from the recruiting sense of William Hearst, he employed Alfred Henry Lewis, David Graham Philips, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, Sinclair Lewis and George Bernard Shaw, all who went on to write some of the most famous articles for their time.

As decades past, the magazine changed from strictly articles to short novels and stories, sales soared (1.7 Million copies in circulation) and over 5 million in advertising revenues in 1930. Cosmopolitan magazine proved to be an unbelievable success, after the Second World War magazine sales topped the 2 million mark. Unfortunately demand for the magazines content decreased in the 50s, circulation numbers crippled to just over a million, despite the reduced revenue cosmopolitan magazine subscriptions were still a profitable venture, even today Cosmopolitan is one of the most subscribed to magazines in the world.

Whether you’re an author publishing through traditional means or delving into self-publishing, you are going to want the feedback of a good editor or perhaps more than one. The difficulty for authors, especially those choosing self-publishing is when do you take an editor’s advice and make changes and when do you determine you’ve gotten enough feedback? This can be a tough call, and it often comes down to the author finding a happy medium.

The first thing writers need to consider is how many editors are too many? In writing and researching Shades of Darkness, Shades of Grace, over the duration of the project seven editors reviewed the manuscript. Some of them were extremely helpful, taking an objective approach and offering suggestions that made for a better book. Others seemed to check objectivity at the door, letting their personal likes and dislikes influence how they felt the story should develop. By the time the book was completed, I felt as though I had let too many cooks into the kitchen, all fussing over the same pot, either adding spices or removing them.

What I learned from the editors I consulted were two simple things. One, you cannot make everyone happy. It’s just not possible, so you write the best work you can, one that as many reader’s as possible can relate to. Number two, as an author you ultimately have to decide if the suggestions editors make are enhancing your work, or turning it into the work of someone else. Again, it goes back to the idea of authors finding a happy medium that improves the work, but is still your own.

The first editor I contacted was probably the most beneficial. Prudy loved the book, but thought it should begin with the wedding because she believed this was where the story truly started. She also suggested plotting the story on a calendar over the specific number of years the novel took place. In this way, real life events could be woven throughout the narrative, giving the reader not only a sense of place and time, but information that might arouse their interest in other areas related to the story.

Another editor’s feedback was more helpful regarding ways to improve my writing, rather than this particular story. She pointed out little tics in my style &ndash for example using the same word too often, advice which I didn’t just apply to the novel, but every other piece I’ve written. Her observation helped me expand my vocabulary and fine-tune my work. Two suggestions I took issue with was the fact that in the novel Kay and Tim don’t have any children, and that as a minister’s wife, this editor felt Kay should be shown in church more. I thought both points had nothing to do with the story and verged on stereotyping. I made this decision from my own experience of knowing childless couples where a spouse works in ministry.

One positive aspect of consulting multiple editors is that enough voices may convince an author to make a significant change. Out of seven editors, six wanted to see the ending beefed up providing the reader with an enhanced sense of satisfaction and closure. The one holdout was a good friend and her argument was that by expanding the ending, the author was taking the reader by the hand, when she felt their imagination could do the rest. Of all the decisions I made regarding Shades of Darkness, this was by far the toughest. Eventually I relented and significantly revised the ending.

Authors may also find themselves confronted with one editor who changes something, only to encounter another who changed it back. This was particularly true when dealing with the grammatical aspects of the book. The second editor was an old-school English major, so her placement of commas was more extensive. The fifth editor removed what she believed were too many commas and thus we had a full-scale “Comma War.” When the last editor reviewed the manuscript, edited commas were being replaced. What I strongly recommend is authors select a specific grammatical style (such as the Chicago Manual of Style or Modern Language Association) and stick to it.

Ultimately, regardless of what an editor suggests, as the author you need to remember this is a subjective process. The final editor made a suggestion that would have entailed rewriting the entire manuscript in a way that I felt was not beneficial to the story. But because I thought the suggestion had some merit, I compromised and trimmed the scene to a point where I felt comfortable, thereby finding a happy medium.

“[Henry David] Thoreau is a keen and delicate observer of nature - a genuine observer - which, I suspect, is almost as rare a character as even an original poet; and Nature, in return for his love, seems to adopt him as her especial child, and shows him secrets which few others are allowed to witness.” &ndash Nathaniel Hawthorne (Journal entry, September 1, 1842)

Most of the greatest poets were not recognized for their work until they had long been laid to rest. Many suffered great difficulties in their personal lives, which may have led the poet to the wellspring from which they drew their words.

It has been suggested that poetry was used in our long distant past as a creative means of passing along traditions and history simply because the poetic language was easy to memorize and enjoyable to recite. The bards in medieval times were renowned for their use of poetry.

From free verse to rhyme and meter, poetry remains a benchmark in the world of literature. The pursuit of poetic markets remains a positive way to further an ancient form of storytelling that requires a special gift while the poet’s emotions are largely exposed.

Poetry is the one element of writing that impacts the emotions of writers more than any other. The vulnerable feel of poetry allows a writer to explore circumstances and emotions in a way that is difficult to do in most writing genres.

Most poets craft their words as a stress release and rarely share them with the world at large, however, there may be markets available for poetry.

It is true that publishers of poetry are about as plentiful as wheat fields in the Arctic, but there are other avenues for your poetry that can allow you to publish your material in unique and memorable ways.

Greeting card publishers are always interested in new succinct poems to share with card buyers. Poems can also be artfully placed on a line of gift merchandise including mugs and artwork suitable for framing.

In our modern era you would be hard-pressed to find someone who is able to make a living writing poetry. However poetry can provide a source of writing income and is often a creative outlet for those who also write in other genres.

It is true there are those who have little appreciation for poetry, yet the poet’s work has brought about significant societal debate and ultimate change in our world. Perhaps this is because the reader is invited to share the writer’s perspective in an emotional way that allows a perspective to be heard with something other than ears.

Over the years, many people have asked me to look at their writing. “I need to know, do I have talent or not,” they say. “Then I’ll know if I should pursue writing or stick to accounting.”

Their request is seriously flawed, I’d reply. Anyone can become a better writer. When I taught English Composition at various colleges, I saw irrefutable proof of this. Students who submitted hackneyed, half-dead writing to start with turned in lively, well-written essays by the end of the semester. Likewise, I’ve seen plenty of writers whose work seems plain and unimaginative get assignment upon assignment from magazines while others with dazzling wordcraft skills can’t get published anywhere.

According to Stanford psychology professor Carol Dweck, I was right to question the query about talent. Dweck’s book, Mind-set: The New Psychology of Success, reports research showing that in education, the arts and business, people who believe talent is fixed and inborn do not fully develop their potential and do not recover easily from setbacks.

Those who believe talent can be developed, regardless of apparent starting point, not only achieve more but also prompt greater achievement in their children and staff.

Her best news: You can change your mind-set about talent or intelligence. In only two months, kids who were taught that the brain, like a muscle, improves with exercise saw

their math scores rocket from F’s to B’s.

Toss out the belief that you either have writing talent or you don’t. Instead, approach getting published as requiring a set of skills that you can deliberately learn. These skills include:

1. Being sensitive to the differences between words. A good dictionary can help with this, if you consult it to learn, for example, whether a “cauldron” is the same as a “kettle” or when a gang member would be said to have “bravery” and when “bravado.”

2. Recognizing that getting your message across has less to do with what you meant and more to do with how readers understand the words you put together. If no one “gets it,” you must write it differently. Often this lesson is harder for those who feel desperately called to write than for those with a more matter-of-fact attitude toward writing.

3. Being willing to put a piece of writing aside, look at again in the cold light of the morning and rearrange, replace and revise the elements of the piece to tell the story more clearly and more artfully.

4. Having the discipline to learn and apply the rules of spelling, grammar and usage. Yes, when your work is accepted for publication you’ll usually have an editor who’ll save you from major mistakes. But editors prefer working with those who know and follow the standards of professional writing.

5. Being able to bounce back from disappointment. In the writing business, the possibility of rejection never goes away. Successful writers learn not to take it personally for more than an hour or so, then they simply go on to the next publication outlet or the next writing project.

From what I’ve observed, these five skills and attitudes matter much more for success as a writer than anything we’d generally label as talent. Resolve to develop yourself along those lines and you’re certain to get somewhere as a writer. Really!