What better way to kick off 2021 than to do some intensive planning for your life as an author? Goals are dreams with deadlines. But we must define those goals first.
Think about:
How much do you want to write?
What do you want to publish and how?
How will you grow your audience?
What will you do to nurture your creativity?
I used to be a hesitant writer, quietly producing work, waiting to “be discovered.”
Let’s face it, there are millions of writers out there. You can’t wait for it to happen, you have to make it happen.
Don’t let another year go by waiting for the right time. Conditions will never be perfect. The right time is now.
Have you ever asked yourself this question and truly answered it?
This is important to define for yourself, the quality of your work. The past few years have been filled with chaos, fear, and upheaval. As things normalize, it’s the perfect time to let the dust settle and get laser-like focus on why you write and how you’re going to get your words into the world.
It’s not easy to be an aspiring writer. Just tell someone you want to become a successful fiction author and their reaction will be something like:
Laughs awkwardly until they realize you’re serious.Shows concern about your mental healthSays, “Really? Uhhh… Good luck with that.”
It’s the same look adults gave you when you were six years old and you told them you wanted to grow up to be a pegasus.
That’s because writing fiction is a time and energy-intensive pursuit that never guarantees a big material reward.
As a marketing strategist for authors, I see many writers approaching their writing career with a “lottery mindset.” They scribble out a book, feverishly upload it to Amazon, and wait for overnight success.
When they don’t wake up on the bestsellers list, they give up.
This the paradox:
Only by NOT writing for money or fame will you possibly become a successful author because once you begin writing for sales, your words will lose their magic.
You must have a deeper reason than to become wealthy and famous. You need to think about who you’re writing for and how you want them to think and feel after reading your work. Either that, or writing must be so satisfying for you that it is its own reward.
Maybe you write because it’s therapeutic, allowing you to express yourself and make meaning of your experiences. Maybe you want to make people laugh and forget their worries. Maybe you just want to scare the hell out of them.
Whatever the reason, I suggest you create your own writing manifesto that states your big-picture reason for writing. Rewrite it till it’s powerful and succinct. Read it each day before you begin working on your stories. Click here for an example of how powerful a writing manifesto can be.
Not only will a writing manifesto help you on the hard days when nothing is working, keeping your mission in mind will inspire you to produce stories that will impact your readers and the world.
To say that 2020 has been a crazy year is an understatement. What we’ve experienced is stranger than fiction, and whatever plans we made for this year surely were disrupted in some way.
Now that we’re about to close out 2020, it’s important to process all that happened (or didn’t happen) for us as writers this year.
We need to find out what worked and what didn’t, so that we can double down on the things that brought us results and eliminate whatever is draining our time, energy, and creativity.
Author Year-End Review
What worked for you? What didn’t? Let’s analyze.
What reasons do you have to celebrate?
What helped or hindered your creativity?
How close were you to your writing, publishing, and sales goals?
What daily habits and mindsets are holding you back?
If you want to make 2021 your best year ever as a writer, then the Author’s Year-End Review will help you 100%.
Being a writer today is a battle. In a world where material wealth is the marker for success, you fight against the system, you fight against the world, you fight against time, and you fight against yourself.
Your creativity is a tender sprout erupting from the cracked earth, and you must water it, feed it, and shield it from the elements. Guard it with bared teeth and a snarl, because deep inside you know that if you lose this gift of writing, you will have lived your life in a desperate, choking silence.
But you can take up arms against all the things you think you should be doing this weekend and surround yourself with knowledge and inspiration.
Here are 5 TED Talks for writers that will fill you on a mental, emotional, intuitive, and spiritual level so that you will be ready to claim your right as an artist and do your best writing yet.
Slow–mo Multi-tasking?
Do you have many writing projects going on at the same time?
Multi-tasking has a bad reputation, but Tim Harford talks about “slow- motion multi-tasking” and all the great minds who worked by this kind of system (like Einstein and Darwin).
This technique makes the most of the ebbs and flows in your thinking while cross-training your brain in other disciplines to prime it for creative breakthroughs.
Social media is as much a curse as it is a blessing.
This is one of writers’ most pressing concerns during our virtual meetings in the Writers’ Mastermind. In almost every conversation, someone has said that they would like to throw their phone or computer out the window.
Joseph Gordon Levitt has been acting since he was a child. I first became a fan of his after catching him in Mysterious Skin and Brick. He is not a writer, but he is an artist, and even though he has “made it,” he confesses that he is still susceptible to the toxic charms of social media.
Ask yourself, honestly. Are you writing for attention?
We may not even realize it when we are writing or promoting our writing that we are being quietly steered by the fickle mob or by the desire to keep up with or outdo others.
In this video, Levitt talks about how creating for attention takes us out of the flow state and makes for sub-standard art. Don’t fall into the trap!
Julie Burstein compares our creative output to the Japanese art of raku pottery in which the imperfections are treasured.
Julie talks about embracing the whole breadth of the life experience and growing from the broken places.
She also tells us not to try to control the outcome of our stories so much. At a certain point we have to let go and be open to what is coming to us beyond the confines of our usual thoughts.
Creating a nursery for wildly, creative writing spurts
How does your environment affect your writing?
What kind of people do you surround yourself with?
The mission of the Writers’ Mastermind is to create a place where a writer can surround themselves with great minds while having all the knowledge they need to make their dreams come true.
Actually, this is not a TED talk, but I had to include because it outlined so thoroughly how the Writers’ Mastermind works.
Tina Seelig talks about optimizing our creative environment using the “Innovation Engine.”
We can create the conditions to write at a level we never dreamed of by focusing on the following elements:
If you watch only one video in this post, make it this one.
I saved this for last because it will set your creative kindling on fire.
Elizabeth Gilbert talks about how historically creative people have reputations for being mentally unstable. Writers are in danger of becoming undone by their gifts. As much as we crave success, we are equally terrified by it. What if the muses don’t return?
Elizabeth explains how linking our creativity to suffering will lead to anguish. We should not accept misery as part of the deal. There is only so much we can do to invoke the mysterious and fleeting spirit of genius, but there is also an upside to this. We are not wholly responsible for things not turning out the way we’d hoped.
She tells us how to manage the emotional risk of baring our souls in our work by detaching from the ego and distancing ourselves from our writing. We must empty ourselves to be the conduit for inspiration. We must allow ourselves to slip into the flow, that hypnotic state of creativity that approaches the divine, where we get to be gods for one exquisite moment.
Bottom line, you have to be there. Keep showing up.
