How to be a more effective writer? Well, there are emotional and psychological cadences that are important for effective writing: confidence, perseverance, perhaps courage. One must be able to tread the inevitable ebbs and flows of motivation. There are no shortcuts, and discipline is imperative. But leaving those emotional and psychological registers behind for the moment, I’m reflecting on the one piece of technical advice that I have most often offered throughout my career to the question, “How can I improve my writing?” If I could give but one answer to that question, I think it would be: Attend to your topic sentences

I imagine for some people being edited feels like a kind of assault, one’s deepest failings and frailties laid bare for the judgment of others. I know that I have edited authors who are awaiting my response to their work like a defendant awaiting a verdict. I suspect to many authors, a query in the margin can come across as an accusation: Why did you choose THIS word and not THAT? Why did you phrase it this way and not that? What is WRONG WITH YOU???

This feeling of the edit as a judgment can work in the opposite direction, too, as many writers look forward to the euphoria of vindication, of having their worth or their talent verified by an expert, self-esteem padded and pampered by gushing praise.

But an edit is not an audit. It is not the time either for condemnation or vindication, however powerful the psychology of the moment might be. I want to suggest that an edit is better thought of not as a moment of judgment, but as a process of collaborative refinement. 

I've been running a series over on Bluesky, a photo album of the people in Daisy Lampkin's life. The breadth of her social connections, her activist allies, and her political networks is breathtaking. The following give some sense of that scope, and how she (and others) overlapped their community and national networks, enriching both. Follow along for more on my Daisy Lampkin biography project.

Several weeks ago I surveyed the multitude of steps it takes to publish your book. Most of those steps occur once you submit your manuscript and may be opaque to first-time writers. Let’s talk a little about what it takes to get your manuscript to submittable quality. In other words, let’s talk about what I, or any qualified editor, do for you and your manuscript.

I feel myself growing more and more passionate about books, about publishing books, about writing books myself, and about helping others craft powerful and moving narratives. No doubt it’s a function of age, trying to cram more significance into fewer days. But I’ve come to realize that I’ve always been surrounded by writers and their books, and surely that’s left an imprint. Adolescent summers with my grandmother on Boston’s North Shore put me in a bedroom walled by books. This remains an indelible memory. Upon arrival my habit was always, year after year, to peruse the shelves, finger the spines, study the titles, see which piqued my interest compared to the previous summer. Perhaps I was indexing my intellectual growth in some way. The order of the books never changed on the shelf, however, unless I did it myself, a private time capsule for next year. The centerpiece of that collection, a complete run of Harvard’s fabled set of classics, “The Five Foot Shelf of Books,” now sits on my shelf. Even now I often lose myself in daydreams staring at my own bookshelves. Entering the home of a new acquaintance, I always make a direct run to the bookshelves, if there are any.

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the three types of publishing: traditional trade presses (both the big five as well as small independent presses), hybrid publishing, and self-publishing. I want to offer some further thoughts on the hybrid model.
 
If you had asked me even three or four years ago what I thought about hybrid publishing, I would have scoffed. Hybrid publishing, where an author pays a professional press to have one’s book published, would have struck me as a gussied-up version of the old vanity press approach: pay to play. The hallmarks of respectable publishing, I would have insisted, are precisely what makes it difficult to accomplish: gatekeeping, exclusivity, and prestige. In a model where anyone with a few bucks can get his or her book published, it would seem to devalue the worthiness of the ensuing book.
 
Well, dear reader, my mind has been changed. To be sure, hybrid publishing is not for every author or every book. But it definitely has its uses.

I take an expansive view of what scholars call “public diplomacy”: the information and cultural outreaches that governments make to the people of other nations. Most scholars understand that public diplomacy is a form of propaganda. In democratic societies, public diplomacy is traditionally constrained by norms and expectations, notably that governments will not tell demonstrable lies to their own or other citizens. On the other hand, governments have at their disposal the full range of psychological manipulations available to advertisers and marketers, the capacity to mobilize convincing displays or grandeur or power (including brandishing military power as a form of persuasion), and of course also the ability to conduct covet operations, of the kind the CIA performed regularly during the Cold War.
 
In those years the Americans conducted a capacious public diplomacy to nearly all parts of the world, and many of those operations clearly bumped up against, and at times violated, democratic norms and expectations. The public diplomacy/propaganda campaign in the Netherlands tended not to be as ideologically heated as in other parts of Europe where lively communist parties were deemed a real threat to American interests. But the effort, though comparatively tepid, was lively enough, offering clues as to the level of engagement that the Americans pursued with their Cold War propaganda.

Brief post to invite readers to follow me on Bluesky (David J. Snyder (@fractalpast9.bsky.social) — Bluesky) where throughout this Black History Month I'll be posting brief bios and photos of all the primary characters who will appear in my Daisy Lampkin biography. Today we kick off with the lady herself: Post by @fractalpast9.bsky.social — Bluesky