When we don’t purposefully and deliberately choose where to focus our energies and time, other people—our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and even our families—will choose for us, and before long we’ll have lost sight of everything that is meaningful and important. We can either make our choices deliberately or allow other people’s agendas to control our lives.
Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less
When it comes to becoming a successful author, planning is 200% more valuable than writing. I’m not talking about outlining your stories and novels before writing them. That is important too, but I’m talking about planning on both macro and micro levels to reach your big picture vision of your life as a writer. Without planning ahead, we get distracted, sidetracked, and stray off task.
Aspiring writers are especially susceptible to writer’s drift, a state when we feel like life always gets in the way of our writing. There are several reasons we allow this to happen on a conscious or subconscious level.
1. Because we don’t earn a steady paycheck from writing yet, so we can’t justify spending time and energy on it.
2. We usually don’t have writing deadlines, except those we impose on ourselves. When we fail to meet them, who cares? No one knows but us. We have no one to hold us accountable.
3. We don’t know exactly what to do next, leaving gaps to be filled with interruptions, distractions, or someone else’s priorities.
We’ll get up for a job we’re not crazy about. We rearrange our schedule for our kids or significant other. We even drag ourselves out to walk the dog no matter how tired we are.
But how often do we take a stand for our writing?
The first chunk of time to be sacrificed when some unforeseen issue comes up is our writing time. Writing time is vague and unconvincing. People don’t respect it. Even we’re not sure what it is we’re not getting done when we’re not able to write. So it’s easy to dismiss it as no big deal.
The one person we fail is ourselves. And we don’t realize the impact it makes on our wellbeing when we’re constantly letting ourselves down by pushing aside our heart’s dream.
What would happen if you treated your writing with the same priority as other aspects of your life?
And how do we put ourselves into position to do that?
How do we do it without feeling guilty or self-indulgent?
Planning out your writer’s path to the smallest details will keep you committed to your writing. This means breaking things up in 5-year, 1-year, quarterly, weekly, and daily goals.
It’s not about finding time to write. It’s about making time to write.
Making sure you always have something scheduled to do next will ensure that you avoid wasting time, overwhelm, and paralysis. This will help you keep moving forward no matter what.
You’ll be able to ignore your fears and push past rejection. You’ll always be able to put one foot in front of the other by executing the next step in your plan.
Start Here
I’ve created a planning guide to avoid writer’s drift. You can download it for free using the link or form below.
Have you ever asked yourself this question and truly answered it?
This is important to define for yourself, the quality of your work. 2020 was a year of chaos, fear, and upheaval. As we begin the new year, 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 health
Says, “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 be an a pegasus when you grew up.
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 heart.
You must have a bigger 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.
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.
You got this!
Create your Writing Manifesto!
Join us for the Ultimate Author Planning Workshop in the Writers’ Mastermind.
Develop your own powerful Writer Manifesto.
Crystalize your vision of what it means to be a successful author.
Reverse engineer a step-by-step plan to your career as a fiction writer.
Avoid wasting time, overwhelm, procrastination, and paralysis.
I’ve worked with many first-time self-published authors andall the writers I’ve met, I mean ALL, have stars in their eyes when they get ready to publish their first book.
Everyone has that feeling when they’ve created something special. Creativity is a divine force and we feel it’s destiny. The world has been waiting this book!
We imagine uploading our copy to Amazon and waking up in the morning with 10,000 downloads.
The truth is that, unless we have a large author platform and at least some basic PR skills, no one will even know we have a book out.
If we don’t know how to SEO our book for Amazon’s search engines, the likelihood of anyone stumbling across it are slim.
Do we have an eye-catching book cover?
Did we hire a professional editor?
Or did we just slap up our final draft and expect people to ignore any flaws because it’s The Book of Destiny?
I think every writer must to go through this.
It’s part of the process, and we have to try because, let’s face it, some writers do become overnight successes.
You can’t win the lottery if you don’t buy the ticket.
Still, I try to prepare my new author clients for the difficult road ahead. Even if your book is good, even if it’s extraordinary, you have to compete with the hundreds of thousands of other authors who have the exact same dream.
This is hard to explain to the first-time author. In my experience, they completely filter out my warnings and march ahead with a huge smile, ready for the confetti to fall and the champagne to pop.
At this point, I just wait and let them go through it. Once they realize it’s not likely they’ll become famous overnight, then they’re all ears and we can get to work.
So go ahead, choose your dream cast for the movie, visualize what you’re going to wear on Good Morning America, and practice your autograph.
Enjoy it.
Never stop dreaming about it.
Don’t give up!
Just keep in mind that it may not happen with your first book. Years later, you’ll probably be thankful it wasn’t your first book (I know that I don’t want the stuff I wrote years ago to ever surface).
Just trust that each challenge is a stepping-stone on your journey to becoming the writer you were meant to be.
Nothing is more paralyzing than self-censoring before the words hit the page. Some part deep within us applies a filter for Mom, Dad, Grandma, our significant other, our boss, our kids, or future kids that we may or may not ever have!
You don’t have to take ownership of your story. It’s not you. It is a distillation of all you’ve seen, heard, and experienced.
You are not your thoughts and feelings. You have your thoughts and feelings. You are not your experiences. You are not your stories. You are a conduit.
Much of your writing may be based in truth, but no one has to know that. Write and let it go like a balloon into the sky. The words will be found. Then the stories belong to your reader.
Don’t worry about the nasties you write. Under the guise of fiction, you can write anything and everything you want. If Mom reads it and is appalled, simply lie. Yes, tell her you made it all up. Deny it to the death. She can’t really prove otherwise.
