Editorial Notes = clarifying information, additional insight, annotations

Hiya Reader,

I read recently the statistic that only 20% of anyone in any profession is a high performer.

Of course, when we're talking about writing or self-editing or juggling flaming axes, "high performer" can be defined in many different ways. Will you be part of that 20% or just an onlooker for your own life?

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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.

Apologies for the semi-blurry photo but I grabbed it while in the passenger seat of a moving vehicle.

What's next? Exclamation Eatery? Period Place? Hyphen House? Ellipsis...Eats? (<-- love the built-in branding here)

Actionable Tip of the Week

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

In my writing group we've been talking a lot about motivation and accountability: very old problems with a very long list of attempted solutions. Such as:

You've bought the beautiful notebook (still blank). You've joined the writing group (attended twice). You've downloaded the productivity app, set the daily word count goal, told your friends you're "working on something," and spent a meaningful afternoon color-coding your outline.

And yet.

A writing partner is theoretically perfect. You check in, you share pages, you hold each other to deadlines. In practice, you spend 45 minutes texting about how hard writing is and call that a session.

Maybe you could try the shame factor, such as the public declaration, such as NaNoWriMo (RIP), the Instagram announcement, the "I'm writing a novel" dinner party confession. Social pressure is real! Until it isn't.

How about the reward system? Finish a chapter, get a treat. Less effective when you discover you can give yourself the treat anyway. You're the master of your destiny after all.

Creating a schedule seems like the most sensible option. Block the time, show up, write. Great plan until one missed day becomes two, and suddenly it's been three weeks and you're reorganizing your bookshelf "for inspiration."

The root problem with most accountability systems is that they live in the present. They rely on current-you to care enough to enforce consequences, and current-you, frankly, has other things going on.

​Which brings us to a genuinely clever workaround, a website designed to motivate future you, called, appropriately, future me. The concept is simple. You write an email to yourself and schedule it to arrive next month, next year, or five years from now.

In addition to goal setting and motivation and just setting intention, these are some ways to use it.

• The Deadline Letter. Write to yourself six months from now. Describe the project you're working on, where you hope to be, and who you'll feel like if you've done the work versus who you'll feel like if you haven't. Future-you will open that email. Future-you will feel things.
• The Vision Letter. Skip the deadline pressure entirely. Write about why this project matters to you. What does finishing it mean? Why does this story need to exist? When you're stuck in revision hell, a letter from your own hopeful, early-draft self is surprisingly motivating.
• The Check-In Letter. Write quarterly letters to yourself with specific, small goals. "By the time you read this, you will have finished Part Two." Short horizon, low stakes, high accountability.

The magic of FutureMe isn't technology — it's the psychological weight of a message from your past self. You made a promise. It arrived in your inbox. Now it's weirdly hard to ignore.

Try it and report back!

Reader Question of the Week

Leslie wrote: How do I edit my own work without missing things?

Leslie! Aside from reading every single issue of Editorial Notes?

Just kidding. Sort of. But I'm assuming you know the classics. Wait before you edit. Read it out loud. Print it out. Change the font. Read it backwards. These are good tips which is why I write about them in some version a lot. But if you've tried all that and you're still sending things out only to spot the embarrassing error thirty seconds after you hit submit, welcome to the club. The problem isn't your method. It's that your brain wrote the thing, and your brain is not a neutral party.

Do you miss big-picture problems: structure, pacing, the argument that quietly falls apart in the third section? If that's you, try writing a one-sentence summary of each paragraph after you've drafted, not before. What you thought you said and what you actually said are often two different things.

Do you miss the granular stuff: repeated words, tense shifts, sentences that made sense at midnight but are gibberish in daylight? Reading each sentence in isolation, out of sequence, short-circuits the narrative momentum your brain uses to carry you past mistakes.

Do you miss the more nebulous and difficult to define "emotional stuff"? Give it enough time, do the best you can, and then find at least one other human to read it.

Want to Submit a Reader Question to Helene?

Give in to the urge.

Link of the Week

​Turns out a chalkboard calendar from my great-aunt's kitchen has been haunting me for fifty years.

I ❤️ Hearing from You!

Comments? Just reply to this email or click this link. I respond to every email—that's a promise.

Thanks for reading!

~Helene, your writing sherpa