Hello Reader,

This is the final Editorial Notes issue of 2025. I'm on holiday, so here's a reader favorite from the archives. I'll be back with a new issue in your Inbox on January 7, 2026!

Earlier this week, I came across a sobering yet inspiring statistic that I just had to share with you!

Assuming you average seven to eight hours of sleep in each 24-hour period (#lifegoals), ten minutes equals approximately one percent of your waking time. One percent! On the one hand, it's such a small amount of time, easy to find (or carve out) pockets during the course of each day. But on the other hand, ten minutes a day, every day, adds up to a whole buncha time.

Experts including Malcolm Gladwell point to a calculated 10,000 hours of work required to achieve total mastery of a skill. That's a tall order for the average human! Yet, competence and proficiency can be achieved in just 20 hours. Doing the math, that's just four months' worth of ten minutes per day.

What ten minute daily habit can you begin right now?

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Example of the Week

Sometimes this is a good example—or a great one. Sometimes this is a bad example—or just a funny blooper. Sometimes a combination. You never know.

Many writers, even seasoned ones, write really crappy first drafts, full of cliches, flat language, errors, and filler. I know I do! Quality writing has far more to do with editing—the tweaking, the hammering, the cattle prodding—than writing. Anyone can write "I tried to make sense of my life," "I was filled with love," "I felt encouraged." But for a reader, who cares? That is, until a focused editorial eye shines its Sauron-style laser on the quivering yawnfest of a sentence and forges it in fire.

This is true for all of us, not merely those who write in narrative styles. Just ask my business clients what specific, precise, image-centric language did for their projects and audience engagement.

I present, without further comment, absolutely gorgeous sentences from a book I've recently loved: Safiya Sinclair's How to Say Babylon.

"I could keep pulling the thread, spend years unraveling all that unraveled me, or I could pull it all through the needle’s eye, and stitch.…I finally met her...a tiny little wide-eyed thing, grabbing on to her crib. I did not expect it. Like a vase suddenly poured full with water, there was love. My bloodline stretched ahead of me, tangible and woven to hers, and everything seemed so possible."

Actionable Tip of the Week

A trick to add to your self-editing toolbox right now!

When you dedicate yourself to editing yourself for a while, you'll notice your own writing quirks. For example, I write really long sentences and always have to edit them down.

Short sentences don't guarantee clarity, but they usually beat the maze of longer, convoluted ones. Aim for an average of about 20 words. You don't have to be a bean—er, word—counter to find overlong sentences. Instead, just eyeball it—aim for two typed lines. Or, let your ears guide you—read your work aloud and chop up the sentences that sound and feel like a breathless marathon.

Here's a student example: However, what I did learn from my younger years at the university and that situation, is, even though we may make mistakes, life is about learning from those mistakes, and growing from those painful mistakes, and understanding them, and moving forward, and even if it might be scary and overwhelming, what is the worst that can happen? I make another mistake. So, I pick up the pieces and go forward, like I always have.

Here's that same example, but simplified: Life involves making mistakes, but the key is to learn and grow from them. Even when faced with challenges, I've learned to move forward, understand the lessons, and not fear making more mistakes, as they contribute to personal growth.

Reader Question of the Week

Stevie wrote: How do you know when you should give up on a piece? I've sent an essay out close to 20 times and it keeps getting rejected. I believed in it at first, but now I'm starting to think it must be terrible.

Stevie! I love this question. Every editor has different taste, and every publication has a different "flavor." So does every publishing house, from the small operations that put out a single book a year in hand letterpress to the biggies that put out thousands of mass market books annually.

I can't answer the question about your piece specifically, but here's my experience with a piece that I first drafted more than 20 years ago. For the first few years, I sent it out religiously and always got it back, sometimes with a nice note but usually with just a form rejection. I stuck it in a virtual drawer for a decade, though I still believed in it and tinkered occasionally. Six years ago, I sent it out again and was offered publication! The editor told me that she went back and forth on the piece for a while due to length, but she eventually decided it was "too emotionally powerful not to take." And it was nominated for a major literary award that year (though not a winner).

I'm not ranking myself anywhere near the writing greats we all know. Nor do I believe perseverance is enough. But consistent rejection can make us better writers, better readers, and better editors of our own work if we allow it to do its work in us.

Like you, I had to decide whether I was wrong about this piece. Was I too close to it? Was it precious to me alone and no one else? Was I blind to its flaws? Was it really unpublishable? Etc. And I continually came to the same conclusion: no, its time just hasn't yet come. I learned to believe in myself and in my writing and my judgment of its merits. And frankly, the decade of tinkering made it much better than it had been to begin with! So, in a sense, we were ALL right about it. :)

Want to Submit a Reader Question to Helene?

Give in to the urge.

Link of the Week

Embarrassing my family to no end, I unabashedly geek out at interesting language etymologies and tricky grammar questions. I do not apologize for this! Given the number of people who send me articles, funny memes, and links, I believe my obsession may have weaseled its way into the worlds of those who otherwise couldn't possibly care in the least about what language "correctness" really means.

​This article (from the always fun Mental Floss) on the usage of "historic" versus "historical" is a couple of years old, but it just found its way to me. Here's the subhead: "Do they historically mean the same thing? Yes. Do they have separate definitions in modern usage? Also yes."

I ❤️ Hearing from You!

Comments? Want to share your rejection to acceptance journey? Disagree with the 20-word sentence limit? Just reply to this email or click this link.

Thanks for Reading!

~Helene