Understand the stumbling block is a classic concept. If you know what is tripping you up, you can get over it. That is a constant for writers. We all have our own personal stumbling blocks. We all adapt in our own ways.
One of the bigger stumbling blocks for a writer is the day to day self-discipline to get the work done. Nothing happens unless we get in front of that blank page and make it happen. It is that simple and that hard. To make it happen we build our self-discipline.
Discipline Plan
Getting past your stumbling blocks means you have to know yourself and the stumbling block a little bit and formulate a plan for how to prevent your own writing hara-kiri. Here are a few things to line up so that you stave off that temptation to kill your still unborn writer’s life.
Inside You
As writers we already know that when we write we learn about ourselves. We learn what is deep inside stuff coupled with stuff we just ignore. It’s a mess of ignorance and unawareness. We stand a better chance of getting something written if we understand ourselves, a major stumbling block for us all, and the inner self-sabotaging portion a little more. We need to ask ourselves some questions about our thoughts that we have no self-discipline.
A few of the questions we can ask are:
- Were you being too critical of the work, especially when we are dealing with a fresh first draft?
- Did the ideas lost before we get them to the page?
- Are you quitting somewhere shortly after the passion wears off?
- Do we finish everything to the last yard, then run for the hills? We shy from Seth Godden’s rule “Ship it”?
- Why does it seem you only create ideas that fail to work beyond page 45?
- Are you so comfortable with your sideline gig to support your writing that is now the unplaned carreer you never imagined you would have? Did you take your current gig to give you the time to write yet somehow you never get around to putting in a consistant writing effort?
- Have you restarted that fantastic project multiple times with scant pages to show for it?
I am totally guilty of almost all of these. You should see all the partial starts and incompletes I have on my computer and in my files that are still in waiting. I think every writer out there has way more of these that they would care for. They are the road markers on the way to becoming a writer.
Clunkers and Solutions
Our clunkers are kept more for sentimental reasons than any real chance they will become the next great novel or a published short. I seriously doubt I have a million dollar ad in there either. However these same stories, essays and other scribbles serve a greater purpose. They are part of the practice and feedback every writer needs so that they can fix what what is incomplete in their process.
Incomplete
Each incomplete work or incomplete idea come down to finding your solutions in the nueances of your basic process. If your problem is your inner critic, you need to learn how to shut him off. Learn some Writing Confidence. Adding confidence is a great way to shut that critic up. One fix is simple. Commit to writing a really crummy first draft that covers the entire canvas. Your point is to get it done. Do not edit. Do not even pick up the phone when that critic calls. Write.
Story Fade
Issues with a fading story line can often be from either lack of technique or plan. A little study of story lines and plot structues helps. To that end Joseph Campbell’s ‘The Hero With A Thousand Faces’ and Shawn Coyne’s ‘The Story Grid’ are great starts. Follow that up with some writing structure like the foolscap outline and/or Blake Snyder’s beat sheet, ‘Save the Cat’, are often all that’s needed for many to break out of this.
Are You on Theme
Stories fade when we do not know what the story is about. Or put more plainly you do not know your theme. The solution there is to ask yourself, “What is this story about?”. You might have to do that a lot. Even the greats still have a lot of work to do for this every time they start another story. Remember Paddy Cheyefski’s rule, “As soon as I figure out what my play is about, I type it out in one line and Scotch tape it to the front of my typewriter. After that, nothing goes into the play that is not on-theme.“
Don’t feel that you should know everythhing right at the start. Even published authors and writers have to work on what they don’t know and what they think they know. Writing is not just about learning new stuff. It is also about learning new things you do not know in the stuff you alrready know. This includes your actual work. Some writers go so far as to point out that they have even fully written the entire book before they figured out what the story was about.
Just in case you missed it, yes, finding out things can and often does mean you will rewrite the whole manuscript. That’s the process and you work will not just be better for it, it will actually work.
That’s how powerful theme and story line are. Am I really good at this? Well, I think that if I live another 50 years, I might just have it almost mastered. If not, I will have died trying. That is enough.
Foolscap and Beat Sheet
Pantsers will love the foolscap. Plotters the beat sheet. The main idea is to know where you are going. After that it’s a matter of watching for the slow points, fill in the gaps, and let the bodies hit the floor. You are free to make a mess that needs to be written out of too. Steven King is famous for this one. As writers we are not really tied to any given form, but it’s generally a good idea to atleast know where you are going when you take off. Not all of us can be Steven King.
Ship it
Got a ship problem? That is how Seth Goden phrases not finishing. You need to work on your habit of finishing. Like all habits, start small. If you have a problem shipping, ship smaller projects more often at first. Build your habit as you scale up.
Process Problems
There are a lot of places you can fail here form finishing a draft to being unable to put a finished manuscript in the mail. In general though I would look at my process then break the project down and finish each step. Becareful of that voice to take off a day between. My rule here is take the first next step the next day. Plan to draft. Draft to edit. Edit to rewrite. Rewrite to polish. Polish and ship. No skipped days to celebrate. I take one small step the next day. The end rule is to ship on the done. Do not wait. Ship. Ship every time. Commit to it. Ship. You can also start your own blog with a weekly, thrice weekly or even daily column. Make those deadlines. Ship. Kill that failure to fully commit. Ship.
Seth Godin on shipping is totally spot on. Here’s a great interview with Godin on shipping ‘Shipping Creative Work with Seth Godin’ to start you. You can also read his book The Practice.
The Never Ending Restart
Keep on restarting a project? Good. Keep on building. Keep getting up. We fall a lot when we are learning. Sometimes it takes some space to get the guts to plunge again. Do it. Just one small change, fall forward. You want to go further than you did the last time. Ship.
Learn
Learn what you need to keep going. Is it accountability? Join a group. Take a class and use your work as the class project. Join NaNoWriMo. Read deep into a writer who you want to follow and try his guidance. No two writers will have the same view. Use some other creative that clicks, such as the writings of Vincent van Gogh. Emulate what they did and see what works for you.
Done This
My never ending start breakthrough started on one snowy November morning in 2011. I bailed on November 30 2011. Picked it up again January 2, 2012. Dropped it 16 pages later. Back again mid July 2013 for another five whole pages. Ponied up for Nanowrimo November 1 2013 and again in 2016. Three pages total between both. Placed my manuscript such as it was over on Some Day Isle. It took Re-reading Steven Pressfield’s War of Art for the second time to start again on June 8 2018. That one clicked. I finished the draft.
More, I gained control of a new habit. I write every day. 1177 days later I have better results than the preceeding years. I finished the first story split into three books. The next day I stared a new book. That draft is done and I am on to my fifth draft.
Yes I still have problems getting my editing done, but the fact is my writing habit is solid. I am working on the edits.
Comfort Issues
Comfort, it is big thing. We all like to eat. The trouble is: are we, at times, too comfortable for our own good? If you are a writer that is not getting work done, then you could be too comfortable.
Shake Things
You don’t have to stop earning money, but you do need to shake things up a bit to create a sense of urgency to get the work done. You do need some fire. My own experience with a steady sideline job lead to a comfort zone that I would likely have been better off getting out of at least ten years earlier than I did. The old saw says you gotta be hungry. The trouble with too steady of an income outside of writing for the writer is often a loss in drive to get stuff out there because you don’t feel a need to. In short, while you still may be producing, you have taken the edge off your hunger enough that you will not sacrifice an evening out or you will binge wach Netflix instead of getting a chapter edited.
Mind you I did not just up and quit. I did some sensible steps that if you are like me you should consider. I cleared a great deal of my debt load, saved up as I created a simple frugal life style, worked to up my writing habits and created an alternate writing based income path. In short I and my wife worked on an exit strategy so that when we felt we were ‘ready’, we could move forward.
You are going to have to think around this one too. Your plan will be different, but if you cover your bases you can transition to a full time writing career. The key is to look at all the possible choices and choose what works for you. Just remember to keep your main income till you are certain you can cover your basics for a long period of time.
What known writers did
I would suggest you learn from other writers on this. Isaac Asimov was still working as a professor with over 130 books to his credit. Steven King jumped from teaching high school English when he sold his first big seller Christine for an $400k advance and royalties. Michael Crichton had 15 books to his name, which he used to pay for his Harvard medical degree, but he only made the jump from thorasic surgery at Stanford Univerytity with his first big hit The Andromeda Strain. The fact is most writers have to go through a time of planning and work before we are able to write to live. Plan and work this part carefully. The big trouble here is finding your sweet spot. Think of it as having just enough rope to hang you without enough drop.
Retrun to write
When you get stuck and come back to a book or project after some time off. Forgive yourself for the drop. You don’t really need the baggage. Then evaluate where you are and fix whatever you think is your current issue. Create your plan. Act. Track your results. Look for places to improve. Create and implements those changes. Repeat the process.
Know your weaknesses to understand stumbling blocks
Everyone has habits that hold them back in the writing process. These can be a tech addiction like gaming or Facebook, food based addiction like not being able to pass up cookies or a habit addiction such as smoking. That’s why the writer must know what addictions can prevent getting their pages in every day. Self-control is an essential skill in the writer’s tool kit. Developing your self-control, will power if you will, is a key step to being able to ensure your writing time is not taken over by another.
Remove temptations/simplify your process
The next step is to remove those temptations so that you clear your space, time and diet of those things that make getting the work done. Set clearer goals and use an execution plan. Make clear goals once you figure out who you are and what you want to achieve. Honest self-answers for five key questions will aid you in your effort.
1. What are your core values?
You need three to seven traits, such as honesty, team work, motivation that describe yourself and your brand/work. Use those to stay on track.
2. What is your core focus?
This is often call a unique selling position. What makes you different from the competition? A clear focus helps prevent distraction by those things that do not fit the focus.
3. What is your 3 year target?
Studies show that people often over estimate what they can do in the next three months to a year out, but they under estimate what they can do in three years. Plan your longer term goals and break them down into yearly, quarterly and monthly goals. Ensure they are reached by building upon small daily habits that add up over time. Set small minimums so that you will keep momentum.
4. What is your marketing strategy?
Know your key market. For a writer that is not just who will buy your work, but also who you are writing to, aka your avatar. When someone reads you work you are talking to them. Who is that person?
5. What issue do you solve?
This is important for a writer. You do not have just a theme for your books or articles but also for your business. Knowing your theme will prevent you from marketing to those who have no real need for your products and services. It will also help you to serve your true market better.
NEXT Start small and build
We build our best habits out of small repeated steps. Write five minutes a day for a week. Grow to ten next week. Focus on the habit of writing. Build the overall time to thirty minutes or more a day, but set a tiny fallback position so that when things happen, and they will, you can keep the momentum and self-motivation going. If you lose that momentum you are far more likely to quit.
The first minimum I found was just writing two sentences from one of my high school English teachers. The shortest I’ve ever run into was to write just five words from Jessica Brodey. There are tonse of minimums to use from words to time based minimums.
One of the more flow induced is to write what ever comes to mind for a time. There is no staring on the page. You have to put words down the entire time. No checking to see if it’s bad or does not work. Bad ideas generate the process of creating ideas. Create enough ideas and you will get good ones. When your time is up, you can quit for the day.
A minimum gives you a small powerful step to stay in there. Keep it simple. Once you get to your minimum, you can quit. I have found low ball minimums are seldome the only thing I do. Most of the time, I get past them. You will too.
Accountability matters, but not so much.
I have used accountability in some efforts and failed. Accountability is like everything else, what works for you might not work for others. For me accountablitity was letting my wife know where I was in the project. For others there’s the need for a coach or direct mentor. Writers often use tracking to hold themselves accountable, such as writing down the hours completed or their word count on a calendar. The method is not the key part. You want a tool in place to ensure work is moves forward and gets shipped.
Reward a job well done
The work itself is a biofeedback loop once you get it turned on, but you still need to acknowledge the major mile stones (chapters done, rough draft/edit/rewrite completed, etc…) as you move through the process. When you reach a given milestone, give yourself a reward. Do something you love as a break at the end of a chapter. Spend a little special time with a friend after the rewrite for the editor. Open that mystery package that came in this morning out of the blue when your day’s work is done. Recognize your progress with active positive recognition is a strong way to keep motivated and focused on longer projects from books to blogs to a weekly writing column.
Backup plan with set tiny minimums
Psychologists recommend using “implementation intention” to increase your will power. Having a plan for dealing with possible satiations will increase the effectiveness of your overall plan. For instance say you are planning to write your daily blog post before you go on line and get distracted by social media. You know you might need to do some additional research while working on the post. So your back up plan might be to have both chrome and Firefox web browsers. One is setup totally for your blog with blocks for those sites that distract you when you are working. You can use the child settings for this to block your inner child. Then use that browser when you have to go on line while you are writing and need to do research.
Make it flow.
Every writer uses flow to write. Every writer has to create their own way of getting into that state. For some it’s literally sit down and write at a specific time like Somerset Maugham. “…Fortunately for me inspiration strikes at 9am.”. Steven Pressfield likes to use the start of Homer’s Odyssey as a small ritual invocation to turn the writing lights on. Steven King drinks some water or tea and a set 8 o’clock to 8:30 time frame as part of his startup ritual. The key is to create a pattern that warms your brain up for the work ahead.
Track it.
The fact is you are going to need to see gains. You can use a calendar to write down your time, your word count, or even just put in a gold star for making your daily process goals. The point is to help you see that you are making headway.
Another tool is a journal.
Journals help you process life both strange and beautiful. Keeping a separate one for your experiences with writing your blog, books, or writing business can help you weather the down times and find solutions for any questions or issues you might have with a given type of writing, plot line, customers, etc… It also will help you see patterns in your writing and process, such as when do you produce the most or get the best ideas or are the most disciplined. Tracking is all about getting to know you. The better you know you, the better you can work.
Forgive yourself to move forward.
One of the most important parts is to remember we are all human. We can very often fail and come up short in our goals. Stuff happens and we can all too often get caught up in useless emotional traps. To win is to learn to keep the forward momentum. As many experts have told us, we all fall, but the win is to fall forward and keep moving.
A critical part of that fall forward process is to forgive ourselves. Acknowledge what happened and how it happened. Move on but leave the emotional baggage of anger, frustration behind. These emotions only drag you down and grind your momentum to a halt.
Learn from the missteps. Forgive yourself. Refocus,then get back to work. A great tool to forgive yourself is the Six Phase Meditation, a daily exercise that takes just ten minutes to refocus your mind for the day, while leaving the baggage behind. It’s got another advantage. It’s free and all over the web. YouTube or download it. It’s worth far more than the mere ten minutes you will use with it.
Organize your approach
The more missed stumbling blocks are the ones right in front of your face. They are often the ones that are easy to fix if you are just aware of them. One of the ones I used to fall prey to is how I spent and organized my writing periods. I found I got a lot more done if I just had an organized approach. I think you will too. Take a look at my article Build Your Morning Writing Routine for some ideas.
My thoughts on understanding stumbling blocks
Welcome to the writing practice. I hope I have given you some discipline ideas you can use or at least think about while you look at your practice. Find those stumbling blocks, understand them and get those words out there.
Photo by Joshua Pilla on Unsplash