Tag: 7 Habits of a Highly Effective People

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Getting into the Top Tier

Illustration of a woman sitting in an orange floating tub in an overflowing bathtub.

by Désirée Zamorano

First off, you can’t get into a top-tier magazine unless you submit. You can’t submit unless you’ve got work, and you won’t have the work unless you sit down to write. Let’s talk about this.

My bookshelves are filled with texts, some popular, some academic, on how to be a better person, partner, parent, educator, writer. To help you close the gap, I’m not going to talk about all those writerly texts, as marvelous as they all can be. (Personal favorites: Making a Literary Life by Carolyn See, and Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass). I’m going to go old school here, and talk about The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.

Yes, I realize Stephen Covey turned into an industry himself. But I’m going to talk about the two habits that I have carried forward once I read this classic. The first habit involves a Venn diagram with one circle labeled “Area of concern” and the other circle labeled “Area of influence.”

Concerned about your writing? (You should be)

Do you have influence over your writing? (You are the only one).

Where those two circles overlap is where you have your most powerful impact. Continue reading “Getting into the Top Tier”

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Writing and Activism: Let’s Thrive

A large crowd of protestors stretch down a city street, buildings looming in the background. In the foreground a woman holds a protest sign and other folks hold U.S. flags

by Désirée Zamorano

So many of us since Election Day have hovered over our keyboards and felt frozen.

Indeed, why shouldn’t we feel petrified, the legacy of Obama under threat, the vision of who we are, as US citizens utterly upended, the walking nightmares announced each and every day? We find ourselves playing an emotional and draining game of lethal dodgeball, and scramble to regain our footing, our equilibrium, our creative muse.

Then we find ourselves with that perpetually dissatisfied editor shrieking at the back of our skull, telling us inarticulate and inchoate ways how we’re never going to write again, the world will never right itself, nothing we’re writing now will make any difference; it’s time, the voice continues, to discard this fallacy of being a writer and instead do something that will make a difference!

Ha. Of course as writers, we fall prey to making it all about our creativity. So what can we do?

Continue reading “Writing and Activism: Let’s Thrive”