Helping writers make the work of writing happen
It’s time for another installment of our “Author Insights” series. In this series, I’m introducing you to writers who’ve taken their writing all the way to the finish line of publication, and they share their “lessons learned” with you. There’s nothing quite like learning from a writer who has made to the other side.
I’m so happy to introduce you to Janis Brams. Janis has been a member of my online Called to Write Coaching Circle since the beginning of 2014, and is a personal essay writer. Over the years of working together through the Circle, I’ve been delighted to watch Janis develop a number of personal essays and pursue getting them published. While she’d had already had pieces published in an anthology and elsewhere, this was a big win for her for a number of reasons, including how unexpectedly satisfying it was for her to be published online.
I asked Janis to share her insights about her writing process and having this essay published.
Sometimes we wake up to find our lives racing down a path we haven’t chosen. In March 2014, I opened my eyes to discover Michael, my husband, sitting on our bed unable to speak. The challenges that ensued became the topic for a personal essay I wrote, called, “The Event: Two Perspectives.”
Through the process of writing, revising over time, and finally publishing the essay in July 2017, I learned a number of valuable lessons.
1. Allow time to walk away from emotionally charged writing before declaring it ready for others to see.
I began “The Event: Two Perspectives” soon after my husband suffered his stroke. In many ways, I think the writing process served as therapy, a way to work through my doubts and fears. Although I wrote a number of drafts before declaring the piece “ready-to-go,” I hadn’t allowed enough time to pass between our initial trauma and my decision to submit my essay for publication. After several rejections, I was discouraged and shelved my story until I felt better equipped to deal with such challenging subject matter.
2. Focus on the writing process and not how others might react when reading what you’ve written.
After a year passed, I revisited my essay. At the time, even the title was different, “Perimeters of Love.” I remember thinking the title didn’t work, and I’d included too many paragraphs explaining what I felt instead of showing readers. I also decided I’d provided unnecessary back-story, sharing information that didn’t contribute to the narrative.
I made revisions and then posted the new draft while participating in an online class. After receiving comments on the draft, I made more changes and continued to do so until I felt at peace with what I’d written. Still, I made no move to submit my new “final” draft; something seemed to be missing.
While workshopping my piece, I posted about my progress in the Circle and discussed my hesitancy to submit my latest effort. The members in my group and Jenna, during conference calls, supported my decision to sit with my revised draft longer.
At some point, I recognized that an important part of the story was missing, Michael’s perspective. After all, he’d been impacted most. If I was to share an authentic retelling, we both needed to be heard. Michael agreed to an interview, and I used what he shared to write the second part of my essay, his “Silent Monologue.”
3. Researching where to submit a piece takes a lot of time and emotional energy.
Having researched journals I thought were appropriate venues for this piece once, I was reluctant to initiate that process again. I was working on other stories and felt this was not a good time to move my focus from writing to submitting.
Someone in the Circle mentioned Writer’s Relief, a service that researches venue options for authors and even helps to polish query letters. I decided to pay for their expertise. While I experienced a few glitches, I found them to be responsive when I had questions and easy to work with. They read my essay, sent me a list of twenty-five journals they felt were a good fit along with names of editors, their submission requirements, and other pertinent information.
While I still had to send out my piece, I felt I was using my time wisely, targeting journals that might be better alternatives for my writing.
4. Navigating the acceptance/rejection process presents its own challenges.
After skimming submission guidelines for the journals suggested by Writer’s Relief, I found twenty-two to pursue. I earmarked several days to spend submitting and then waited to see what would happen.
The first seven responses were rejections, but two were what I call “good rejections.” Those journals took time to critique my piece and encouraged me to submit to them again. The editors explained, however, that they disagreed with my decision to include Michael’s perspective and would not be publishing this piece.
I began to question my vision. I shared my doubts with Jenna and my group members in the Circle. They reminded me that this story was mine and suggested that I give myself more time before making any changes. In the end, “The Event: Two Perspectives” found a home. I won’t ever forget how thrilled I was to read “Congratulations” in their email’s first line rather than “I’m sorry.”
Thinking back, next time I submit a story, I may prioritize the list of venues and then stagger my submissions. That way, I’ll have better control over where my work is published.
5. Publishing online was uniquely satisfying.
While I had published in print before, this was my first piece published online. Although having a magazine or journal to hold in my hand was exciting, I realized that more people read my online piece because it was more readily available. All a reader had to do was access the site, and my article appeared. Since my goal for a published piece was to reach as many readers as possible, the online venue was a great option.
6. The replies and comments made in response to my piece reaffirmed my feeling that others would find the topic compelling and that sharing our story was a worthwhile undertaking.
While not everybody who responded to The Event had the same reaction, they felt the need to share what they thought. Most said the topic was difficult for them but appreciated making the journey with Michael and me.
Overall, it was gratifying to hear from readers and have an exchange with them. I was amazed at how many old friends learned about my essay through social media and reached out to share their responses. It was a moving and validating experience because, finally, friends and family who knew I wrote had an opportunity to read something that was mine.
Janis Brams has been published in the High Desert California Writers Club Anthology, The California Writers Club Literary Review, Plymouth Writers Group, and a community magazine entitled View.
Janis holds two master’s degrees, one in Education from the University of Pennsylvania and one in Writing Composition from CSU San Bernardino.
Janis is an educator, having taught students of all ages for over 25 years. Now retired, she enjoys running, yoga, hiking, travel, spending time with her grandkids, and cooking. She founded a book club in her community that has been meeting for over forty years.
Find Janis’s other work here:
Welcome back for the fourth (and final) post of my series, (You Can Still!) Meet Your 2017 Writing Goals.
In my prior posts I wrote about Clearing the Decks for your writing, Reverse-Engineering & Revising Your Writing Goals, and Boosting Your Writing Progress (Or, How to Design a Writing Intensive). Today I’m writing about setting yourself up for success.
When you’re aiming to set yourself up for success with an intensive writing effort, there are a number of things to keep in mind. I discussed some of these in the free clear the decks teleclass (which you can still listen to, if you’re interested), but they are worth reiterating in this context as well, along with some other keys to making your writing work.
This often means going to bed early enough in order to be able to write early in the morning, or get through a work day and then have the reserves to write in the evening. Sleep has a big impact on your decision making abilities and your fortitude in sticking with your plans, so when you mess with sleep, your resistance is likely to be higher and your commitment to your writing is one of the first things to falter. So make sure you get enough sleep. :) It’s one of the simplest things you can do to support your writing habit.
You don’t have to stop doing these things, necessarily, but you can turn them into rewards for doing your writing. Just keep them corralled into an appropriate amount of time so you are putting your writing first and reserving the energy you need for writing. Oftentimes we do these things to “recharge” our energy, but it is worth checking in with yourself to see if they are actually recharging, especially past a certain amount of time spent.
You can also create a system of accountability for yourself. This may be the same support system or it may be different. In my own case, I have outside supporters (friends and writing coaches) who are my support system, and my writing programs for accountability (the Deep Dive and the Circle). The primary distinction for me is that I tend to process challenging emotions with my supporters, while I rely the accountability for helping me stay on track and true to myself with my goals. The important consideration when setting up accountability is to have clearly named your goal and timeline so you feel that sense of internal responsibility to follow through.
Leave them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer.
And check out Part I, here: Clearing the Decks, Part II, here: Reverse Engineer and Revise Your Goals, and Part III, here: Boost Your Writing Progress (Or, How to Design a Writing Intensive).
The upcoming two-week Deep Dive Writing Intensive starts on Wednesday, September 20th and the last day to join us is Tuesday, September 19th. Join us and get tons of support and accountability to make deep progress on your book or script. Find out more and register here.
Welcome back for the third part of my series, (You Can Still!) Meet Your 2017 Writing Goals.
In last week’s posts I wrote about Clearing the Decks for your writing and Reverse-Engineering & Revising Your Writing Goals. Today I’m writing about boosting your progress. Next time I’ll talk about Setting Yourself Up for Success, so stay tuned for that posts, coming up soon.
In my last post, I wrote about reverse engineering and revising your goals. The reason to assess your 2017 writing goals now is that we’re within spitting distance of the end of the calendar year, and therefore the “deadline” for meeting 2017 goals …before the clock strikes midnight.
Even if you’ve decided to shift your goals forward into 2018 (I’ve done this with one of my writing goals), you may still want to do an extra “push” with your writing this year to boost your progress and move the ball down the field a little farther than you might get if you a) aren’t writing as much as you’d like to, b) are catching up after a summer writing hiatus or slow-down, c) still want to try to meet your original goal, or d) need a leg up with your motivation.
Doing a focused burst of writing — a short-term writing intensive — is like doing a runner’s wind sprint, where you alternate slower, steadier walking or slow running with more intense bursts of faster running. So doing a writing intensive is about temporarily picking up your pace, then downshifting back into your regular writing habit. (You have a regular writing habit, right? If you don’t, check out my Circle for help.)
A focused stretch of writing can also serve another purpose: It allows you to go deeper into your writing. It’s about putting the focus more intently on your writing. It’s not just about writing faster or more — but it’s also about a quality of experience. Almost like carving out an at-home, immersive writing retreat for yourself.
In the Deep Dive writing intensive I’m running (starting next week), we’re creating this deeper experience by “clearing the decks” — making space for focused, daily writing at a more intense level by eliminating obstacles and distractions. One of the things I talked about during the free clear the decks teleclass (which you can still listen to, if you’re interested), is mentally making space for your writing, including thinking about what you’re reading, watching, and thinking about during your writing intensive.
Here’s a simple strategy for creating a writing intensive for yourself:
When you’re aiming to write efficiently, wind sprint style, you’ll make more of your writing time if you go into it knowing exactly what you’re working on. Sometimes writing is unwieldy at best, but you can still go into it with a clear intention and plan.
The type of plan you develop will depend on where you are with your current book or script.
Here are samples of plans you could create for your writing intensive. The idea with all these plans is to give you a clear list of tasks to work through, one by one, so you can stay focused and efficient during your intensive rather than feeling overwhelmed, spinning in circles, or getting lost along the way.
In my own case, I’m currently working on revising pages for the screenplay I’m working on. Since it’s a fairly major revision, the steps I’ve taken to get to this stage include:
Leave them in the comments and I’ll be happy to respond. :)
And check out Part I, here: Clearing the Decks, Part II, here: Reverse Engineer and Revise Your Goals, and Part IV, here: Setting Yourself Up For Success.
The upcoming two-week Deep Dive Writing Intensive starts soon. Join us and get tons of support and accountability to make deep progress on your book or script. Find out more and register here.
Welcome back to the second part of my series, (You Can Still!) Meet Your 2017 Writing Goals.
In Tuesday’s post I wrote about Clearing the Decks for your writing. Today I’m writing about reverse engineering and revising (if needed) your writing goals. Next up we’ll talk about Boosting Your Progress and Setting Yourself Up for Success so stay tuned for those posts, coming over the next several days.
The first thing you’ll want to do, when it comes to meeting your writing goals for 2017, is to remind yourself of what exactly your writing goals for this year are. Hopefully at or near the beginning of the year you sat down and wrote out your writing goals. Go find them and see what they say. For real. I’ll wait. :)
If you’re already on track, great!
If not, here’s where we come to the reverse engineering and revising part.
Often times goal setting involves a LOT of magical thinking, as I wrote about last time. At the beginning of the year, it’s easy to be romantic about what’s possible. Then unexpected things happen and it’s time now to get really realistic about what’s possible. So you have some choices to make.
There are now 78 working days left in this calendar year (including today)(69 for those of us with kids home for winter break). If you do the math on what you were intending to accomplish, is that realistic and doable?
For example, if you had intended to revise the remaining 60,000 words left in your 120,000 word book, that means revising about 800 words a day. That’s moderately reasonable, right? Of course there are variables, like the depth of revision you need to do, too, so you’ll have to mentally make accommodation for that.
On the other hand, if you were wanting to finish a draft of a brand new 80,000 word book, that means writing 1,025 words per day. Also fairly reasonable.
This is great news, right?
But it also means getting pretty serious about meeting those daily goals. Like now, so you don’t end up binge writing and burning out or giving up in despair as December 31 rolls around.
And, there are additional variables, like what you’re specifically working on, your writing pace, available time, if you want to write on weekends, or can’t write on weekdays.
For example, with revision, there are what I’ve come to call “black hole” chapters, thanks to one of my Circle members. These are the chapters where once you get into it, it’s not just a matter of light editing, but reworking the content in such a way that it requires scrapping it and rewriting it entirely and/or has a ripple effect throughout the entire book. So maybe you’ve just revised the 2,000 words in the chapter, but it took you five extra days to re-plot it and then rewrite it, and it also means that you now have more work to do throughout the whole book. Such is the nature of revision.
So realistically, let’s say this means you can really only revise the equivalent of 400 words per day, on average. That doubles the amount of time to complete the revision, putting you well into next year. Are you okay with that?
If yes, great!
If not, revise your goal to a new more accurate date. But then also create a daily writing plan that reflects this new daily goal of 400 words per day.
(And just to be clear, I know “revising” 400 words per day is something of a misnomer, because sometimes we end up cutting 400 words and then we’re at zero! But I think you can combine both a time goal, e.g. 60 to 120 minutes per day of revising plus working through 400 existing words in your manuscript as a way of handling it.)
Your choice will depend on a number of things.
I like to use SMART goal setting, which I’ll be reviewing with my Deep Dive participants in our Goal Setting Call next Wednesday. Here’s the overview:
And here’s my example:
Doing this work, while sometimes a bit annoying :), helps you get realistic about what you can and want to accomplish and help boost your motivation and energy for achieving it.
Leave them in the comments and I’ll be happy to answer. :)
And check out Part I, here: Clearing the Decks, Part III, here: Boost Your Writing Progress (Or, How to Design a Writing Intensive), and Part IV, here: Setting Yourself Up For Success.
The upcoming two-week Deep Dive Writing Intensive starts on Wednesday, September 20th and the last day to join us is Tuesday, September 19th. Join us and get tons of support and accountability to make deep progress on your book or script. Find out more and register here.
It’s back-to-school time. For many of us, regardless of whether we have kids or are going to school ourselves, this means we’re both recovering from summertime and tuning into the back-to-school fall energy. Which is usually highly motivating and exciting.
It also means we’ve hit that moment where the end of the year is in sight.
If you take the time to think about it, this is the ideal come-to-Jesus moment for meeting your writing goals for 2017 — far better now than to try to pull out all the stops on December 15th. Maybe you didn’t get as much writing done this summer (or year so far) as you’d intended. Maybe you did. If you’re on track, more power to you! If not, this is a great time to adjust your course.
Goal setting at the beginning of the year is often a magical, inspired effort. And by magical, I mean, magical thinking. Somehow, in the thick of the holidays and year’s end, it seems as if the year ahead will not be filled with… anything! We’ll miraculously have oodles of time. We declare that we’ll finally focus and achieve things we haven’t achieved before. And then January happens. Then February. And March. And suddenly it’s end of summer and we feel like we have whiplash looking back trying to figure out where the time has gone.
I know I was unexpectedly affected by illnesses for much of the winter and spring, various challenges with my parents’ health, as well as all of the political happenings. I didn’t have space built into my writing plans for any of those things. I haven’t stopped writing, but I certainly haven’t been as efficient as I’d intended. I’m okay with that. Life happens. But I also still want to make a solid stab at reaching my goals for 2017.
My Deep Dive writing intensive is a big part of this plan for me. I’m looking forward to making a big boost of progress on the sci-fi script I’m working on to help me jump start a broader push through the end of the year. I’m also looking ahead, knowing the holidays are coming, along with my birthday, and my older son’s birthday (10!), plus flu and cold season, so I’m aiming to take action while the energy is here.
Here’s where I’m starting the process. I’m writing this “(You Can Still!) Meet Your 2017 Writing Goals” series to help all of us bring awareness to the fact that the year end is a heck of a lot closer than we think. (There are 80 working days between today and the end of the year, and that doesn’t factor in winter break vacations for those of us with kids.)
Today, we’ll talk about Clearing the Decks to help you meet your writing goals.
In the next three posts we’ll cover Revising Your Goals, Boosting Your Progress, and Setting Yourself Up For Success.
Clearing the decks for writing is a fascinating topic because it can be such a slippery slope — I don’t want anyone to decide they have to KonMari* their entire home before they can write — so it’s worth being mindful about how you approach this.
At the same time, when I’m looking at doing a two week stint of intensely focused writing, I know I’m going to have to make some extra space in my life to accommodate that. So I want to look to see, are there places in my life I can streamline, clean up, delegate, and clear out to make more room for my writing (and for me!)?
This is also a great time review any schedule creep that’s occurred — in other words, have I taken on any extra commitments that I perhaps should postpone or eliminate? Have I back-slid on scheduling my writing time or my resolve to meet it?
I recently led a free teleclass to go over all this in detail. (It was be recorded so you can still listen to the recording.) If you’d like to listen, click here to join my mailing list and get the recording details.
Here’s a preview of some of what we’ll be talking about — I’ll be sharing tips about each of these as well:
Click here to get the free Clear the Decks teleclass recording.
And check out Part II, here: Reverse Engineer and Revise Your Goals, Part III, here: Boost Your Writing Progress (Or, How to Design a Writing Intensive), and Part IV, here: Setting Yourself Up For Success.
The upcoming two-week Deep Dive Writing Intensive starts on Wednesday, September 20th and the last day to join us is Tuesday, September 19th. Join us and get tons of support and accountability to make deep progress on your book or script. Find out more and register here.
It’s time for another installment of our “Author Insights” series. In this series, I’m introducing you to writers who’ve taken their writing all the way to the finish line of publication, and they share their “lessons learned” with you. There’s nothing quite like learning from a writer who has made to the other side.
Plus, if you leave a comment at the end of this post before Sunday, August 6th at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time, you’ll be entered to win an autographed copy of the author’s book in a random drawing. Please note that you must be located in the United States to win.
I’m thrilled to introduce you to Barbara Jacksha. Barbara has been a member of my online Called to Write Coaching Circle since 2014, and is a literary fiction writer. She came to the idea for creating her vision pages journal through writing daily morning pages, and shared her vision pages ideas with the rest of us on our Circle forum. Her idea then took on a life of its own, becoming a tool she could share with other writers.
I asked Barbara to share her insights about writing and self-publishing this book with us.
Most of us have a sense of our writing dreams. We think we know where they will take us. But often, our writing dreams will pull us in unexpected, remarkable directions.
For years I wrote morning pages, filled journal after journal with wonderful observations, silly ramblings, and I must admit, a lot of complaining. One morning while writing about something that had gone wrong, I stopped. Why was I giving so much attention to what I didn’t want? Why energize that? What would happen if I only wrote about what I did want? That’s when my daily practice shifted to writing what I call vision pages: writing about what I want to have, do, be, and experience.
I loved it. I found the writing energizing, empowering, effective, and just plain fun. I told a few people what I was doing and got great feedback. That gave me the idea to create journals that would teach people how to write vision pages and give them space to play with their own dreams and visions.
I’d never created a journal before, so this was brand new territory. I felt intimidated, uncertain, a bit terrified, but also insanely curious and eager to take off on this unexpected journey. As I wrote and designed the journals, I learned a lot about myself and about following my writing dreams.
Here are some of the insights I came to on my journey to creating the journal:
When I first realized that people were interested in vision pages, I was surprised. Apparently, a part of me believed that my ideas couldn’t be valuable to others. That belief is simply not true–for me or anyone else. We all have much to contribute, as people, as writers, and to share what only we can say is one of our biggest gifts to the world. Our dreams and inner visions tell us what we need to share. We just need to listen!
I never thought I’d create a journal. I never thought I’d create YouTube videos of my work, but that’s also on my to-do list. Following our writing dreams often means venturing into new territory, in what we write about and how we get our work out to the world. There are many fresh and interesting possibilities available to us now, and they seem to be expanding daily. Don’t hesitate to open a new door. Once you do, you may find that many others open to you as well.
To create these journals, I polished rusty Photoshop skills and learned Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign from scratch. Climbing that steep learning curve took patience and time, but now I have new skills I can apply any way I choose. Don’t let the need to learn something new stop you. Learning is always worth what you invest in it.
Sometimes the idea of heading off in a new direction feels like you’re starting from scratch. But are you? In creating these journals, I called on skills I developed many years ago when I was a freelance business writer. What skills do you have in other areas of your life that can and do support your writing? Organization? Time management? Presenting to others? If we recognize the wealth of our own experiences, it can take the pressure off and help us see just how capable and prepared we already are.
Trying new things can be frustrating. We can get impatient or discouraged. One of the assignments I gave myself while creating these journals was to keep the process as relaxed and light as I could. When we relax, it’s easier to let our inner visions and knowing guide us. We’re also better able to let things in: new ideas, perceptions, information, solutions, you name it. As often as you can, let your writing be playful and relaxed. Let it be an exploration and adventure. I was amazed at the difference this makes, and I’m sure you will be too.
Maybe it’s time to have a cup of tea with your writing dreams and see where they’d love to take you next!
Manifest your dreams using the power of imagination! Vision Pages takes journaling to the next level. When you write vision pages, you focus on what you desire to have, feel, be, and experience. It’s like creating a vision board, but instead of relying on other people’s words and images, you create with your own hand, using your own words, and write from your own inner wisdom and heart. Writing vision pages is both an immersive experience and a fun, empowering process that can bring about wonderful changes in you and your life. The Vision Pages journal briefly describes the four key steps to writing vision pages and imagining your dreams to life. The rest of the book is yours to fill with your life-changing visions.
Pick up your copy of Vision Pages on Amazon here (affiliate links*):
Barbara Jacksha is a writer and spiritual explorer. Her work centers around liberating and living our inner truth and bringing more magic into our lives. Barbara’s short work has appeared in a variety of publications including the W.W. Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward. She was an editor at flashquake and an editor and co-founder of the spiritual literary journal Cezanne’s Carrot. Barbara lives in the wilds near Santa Fe, New Mexico, with her husband, three dogs, and several neighborhood coyotes. To see what else she’s up to, you can visit her website: www.barbarajacksha.com
Barbara has graciously offered to give away three autographed copies of her book to my readers. Leave a comment on the blog about one of your own writing lessons or something you learned from Barbara’s insights before Sunday, August 6th at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time and you’ll be entered in the random drawing. Please note, you must be located in the United States to win.
When I work with writers to help them stop procrastinating, usually they don’t quite know why they’re doing it. They often end up labeling it as laziness or writer’s block. I can tell you that I’ve never met a truly lazy writer, and while I certainly have met some who are blocked, sometimes a little delving is required to uncover the deeper issues that are stopping them from writing.
Let’s talk about the spectrum of writing-stoppers that show up as procrastination.
You might find yourself procrastinating when you’re stuck. Maybe you’ve hit a section you aren’t sure how to deal with, or you need to rewrite some or all of your draft but you’re not sure where to start, so you just… don’t. This stuckness doesn’t take long to turn into procrastination, and soon, to full on avoidance.
Antidotes: Sometimes when you’re stuck, you need help to get going again. A plot coach or a writing friend often comes in handy here. Alternatively, you might want to write about the writing — this is a great time for some journaling and brainstorming to unlock your writing energy and ideas.
Sometimes the sheer volume of work facing you will cause you to procrastinate. When you’re looking at a mountain, it’s hard not to feel the weight of it bearing down on you.
Antidotes: The antidote for overwhelm is to find one small step to take. In other words, what’s the first thing you can think of, no matter how small, that you know you can do now? Then do the next thing. This is a great time to pick easy things to do too, because when you’re feeling overwhelmed, easy makes it doable. Sometimes I’ll just work on formatting for a bit to get myself back into the project, no matter how fiddly it is. No step forward is too small.
When you get stuck in believing that you must make your writing perfect or get caught up in visions of this being your biggest hit ever, you’ll be triggering procrastination faster than you might believe. Perfectionism, procrastination, and paralysis work together to create a vicious cycle that keeps you from writing, ever. Perfectionism is funny way of staying safe too, because if you don’t write it, you don’t have to see it being flawed and imperfect, nor can you be ridiculed for it.
Antidotes: Make peace with being an imperfect human being who values writing and finishing more than telling yourself whoppers about incredible success or massive failure that hold you back. Embrace the notion that only the divine is perfect, and decide that messy and done is so much better than not writing.
When the voice of your inner critic starts getting loud and scary, it’s hard to keep writing, especially if you listen to it as if it’s the voice of truth and reason, rather than simply a terrified guard dog it trying to keep you safe. Also note that this voice will get louder and scarier the closer you are to the precipice of taking action, finishing a draft, or moving into a new level of your career. If those aren’t reasons to procrastinate, I don’t know what is!
Antidotes: First, pat your inner critic on the head and tell him/her that you’re going to take care of everything, you got this, and you don’t need any help protecting yourself. Then, one by one, rewrite the negative self-messages that swirl through your mind while you’re writing into positive, believable statements. Having a coach or witness for this work helps it land more deeply and take root in your psyche in a positive way.
Good feedback, bad feedback. Feedback period. All feedback affects us. It’s an energetic shock to the system that’s hard to absorb. We’ve been tenderly entwined with our beloved writing only to have it held at arm’s length by a stranger who cooly evaluates it. The stun from this can send you into a tailspin. And good feedback? Glowing feedback on your early chapters? That can be a recipe for triggering perfectionism and the anti-creativity cycle too, because suddenly you have to measure up to your existing work and you might not believe you can.
Antidotes: After giving yourself some time to recover from getting the feedback, take a deep, deep breath. Remind yourself who is in charge. (That would be you.) Evaluate the feedback as cooly as it evaluates your book. What do you agree with? Use that. What do you disagree with? Throw it out or save it for later re-evaluation.
Sometimes you may procrastinate because you’re actually deeply tired or burned out, and reflexively protecting yourself from overextending. This may be the result of binge writing, pushing to meet deadline after deadline, or from being exhausted by a non-writing life circumstance.
Antidotes: Rest. Write for the love of it, if you’re called to do so, but make it easy, like journaling, and give yourself some time to recover. You will feel the call to write again. Trust me.
When you’re not writing… and not writing… and not writing… and it’s just going on forever, sometimes there are deeper creative wounds that have gotten triggered and need addressing. Like that time you were ridiculed for daring to make art and express yourself creatively. Or how you were raised in a family culture that taught you that writing would never pay your bills and you were a fool if you pursued it. Or the scathing feedback you received from someone you deeply loved. Events like these leave open wounds in our psyches, like ghosts in the machine.
Antidotes: Revisit the events in a safe way (such as through visualization or journaling) so you can find the truth in the experience from a broader spiritual perspective. From there, you’ll be able to begin to find forgiveness for yourself and peace with the experience. Often these experiences happen to us when we are young, and having our more mature perspective helps us begin to shift how we feel about it now. While you can do this work on your own, working with a coach or witness who can hold a safe space while you’re processing what happened can accelerate your growth and ability to move past the pain.
There are many more underlying reasons for procrastination, including creative apathy, confusion, adrenaline addictions, and more. Read Part II, here.
Share your stories and experiences in the comments section below.
It’s that time of year again… summer!
The days are getting longer, the weather is warmer, kids and teachers are out for the summer, and vacation season is here. There are so many reasons to put down your pen and turn off your computer and go outside… which I highly recommend.
All work and no play isn’t good for a writer’s soul, after all.
And, at the same time, you’ll want to keep writing so you don’t lose your writing momentum or end up finishing summer feeling disappointed about where you are in your draft.
Here are five tips for making the most of your summer writing, while still enjoying the play time you need and deserve.
While it’s highly useful to treat your writing with as much care and attention as you would a professional job… when we’re in the middle of this expansive summer energy, it’s a good time to remind ourselves that we’re also doing this because we LOVE it.
This helps create a more natural fit between the part of us that wants to have delicious summer adventures and the romantic side of our writing dreams. To that end, even while you’re putting your head down to write, play with matching your summer energy to your writing energy. You might light candles while you work, write in a café, or take your notebook to the beach. This is a great time of year to indulge your most vivid writing life dreams and make it fun.
Over the last couple of weeks as I’ve developed our summer plans, I’ve found myself imagining doing a big chunk of writing on one of our vacations… And doing a big chunk of studying on one of our vacations… And maybe writing some promotional copy on one of our vacations…. and all of these on the SAME vacation. Talk about magical thinking! Even if I actually wanted to write and/or work during a trip (I don’t), I certainly can’t accomplish all of those things and have the time I want to have with my family. Sure, I could probably finagle an early morning writing session before they awaken, but I want my vacation for vacationing.
Similarly, it’s easy to imagine that you’ll have so much extra time during the summer that you’ll be able to make wild progress on your work. I think this might be a holdover from when we were all in elementary school and summers seem to last forever and we have nothing to do… just the way we imagine that a new year will suddenly have so much more free time than we had in the last one. But we don’t. Even if you’re a teacher with the summer “off,” your days will quickly fill with all the things you’ve put off doing during the school year unless you’re mindful about it.
Instead, be realistic about what you can actually accomplish over the course of a summer. See how many days you have to write, and schedule them accordingly with your summer writing goals.
We’re way more likely to do our work when we’re also giving ourselves time to play, rest, indulge, and enjoy. And since summer naturally lends itself to those things, it helps to set up a nicely balanced bargain between the two.
I find that writing as early as possible during the day allows me to have guilt-free down time and playtime in the afternoons, just as I find that when I’m writing when I’m home, I feel good about enjoying my vacations fully while I’m away instead of feeling guilty that I “should” be doing more.
Work hard, play hard, is an adage that fits the bill here… but you have to actually deliver on the play time to make this work.
Taking time off from writing — generally anything more than 1 to 2 days off — tends to create a bumpy “reentry” back into it. So if you go away for a long weekend or a vacation, think about how you’ll reboot yourself with your writing when you get back.
In my Circle, we advise our writers to “go back to the beginning” of working in small increments of writing time if resistance kicks in when it’s time to pick the writing back up. A little accountability goes a long way here too (we offer this in the Circle if you need help).
So if you return from time away and find yourself struggling to get back into your book (or script), try writing for just 5 to 15 minutes to jump start yourself again. You can increase the time over the coming days as rapidly as feels doable to you until you’re back to your normal routine.
Use this guideline: The more resistance, the smaller the amount of writing time.
Summer can be an “all bets are off” season. Between kids at home, weather variations, vacations, out of town guests, extra summer projects, and our own impulses to celebrate the summer, a lot can get in the way of writing.
The more you can be ready to roll with it — to have fun with it even, like you’re playing a “I wonder how much writing I can pull off this summer” game — the easier it is.
I find that a lot of this is about your mental attitude — if you’re expecting your summer to be just like the rest of the year, you’re more likely to get thrown off track. On the other hand, if you take an attitude that things are going to be more up in the air, you’ll be more ready to take the writing time when it comes and just run with it. You’ll also be more likely to have contingency plans ready to go if something comes up, like having a portable writing kit, a flexible schedule, or a backup writing time slot later in the day if your morning writing gets interrupted.
Have fun, writers, and happy summer!
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