Writers mental productivity habits are essential for developing as a writer. The first two me habits every writer needs are to write every day and to finish your work. If you happen to stop there, you will be light years ahead of what many people do.
Write and Finish
The biggest two problems I have ever faced in my own writing have been starting my projects and finishing them. I still have to be carful with thes two booby traps. I am not alone on this. Every writer that has ever lived or ever will live face these demons every day. They do not go away or quit. Worse, they get better and more subtal with time. We get better results because we learn that we can beat them. Knowing that we can win opens the door.
The way we beat them is how we get our brain to shift into the process. We learn habits to make ourselves mentally shift and perform on cue. There would be zero books to show us the way to do that if that were not the case. The most experienced writers will still feel the fear. The demarkation line between the two phases of a writer’s life is whether you know you can beat that anoying little voice in your head. Knowing that you can beat it means you will will fight as long as you stay in the game. That’s why we read those books. It’s a trip into another writer’s mind that opens a vast repository of informantion and instint in our minds. I think learning from other writers is one of those essential trips for every writer.
Writers’ Learn from Writers
Every writer has a stack of authors we rely on for getting through through the learning curves and the rough parts. Some of them are people we know and others are found in books. I have my list of favorte writers I learn from. At the top of my list are Steven Pressfield and Vincent van Gogh. Rudyard Kipling is a close third for the poem If. There is brilliance in his poetic brevity. These are my go to guys for a kick or a clue about what to do when I am stuck, shucking the work or even going over the top in of a flight of production free ego. They remind me of the basics and to keep looking for the nuances forward. The fun part is, when I think about it, I already had the answer. I just did not want to do it.
That’s what Pressfield calls resistance. The malevolent force in our heads that wants us to avoid doing the work we already know we need and want to do. Often it’s a case of I just want to see someone else say it. Then I can let my mind wrap itself around that particualar stumbling block and accept it. I get to that point and I am pounding the keys down the path. We all need that key shove, even the the big guys we are following.
The Third Mental Habit
The third best mental habit to focus on is build your confidence. The mental menace in your head that tells you that you can’t wears a black hat and shoots holes in your self-confidence. The message he sends is not that can’t but that you are not good enough. Same song different verse. A little louder. A little worse. Our weak confidence is often fostered by held over feeling from our school days when the teachers both eagerly awaited our efforts and willing read them while also slashing us over issues with spelling, punctuation, grammar, flow, etc… This can be sent packing by a basic daily practice of writing. See number one above. Often we find that just pounding out our word count and sending those words into the world is enough to build our confidence and send those insecurities in our heads running.
We tend to think from our insecurities. We see getting published, even on your own blog, as hard, if not impossible, work. The reams of accolades we desire fail to just appear before our eyes and all too quickly come to the conclusion that we are just lousy writers. This is just the subtal work of our insecurities. Reality is often different. We might need some work on our writing skills to be sure, but we can fix that by…you guessed it. Refer back to the first two habit skills. We need to realize that the market is saturated with lots of skilled writers and that just because we have not hit the number one slot on Amazon/NY Times, is not really an indication of our skill.
What we might see as a failure of our skills or tallent is often more proof that everyone has limited time to read, and that it takes time for you to build up enough writing that sees enough eyes to really make a mark. Last I checked it took a writer between 10 to 20 books in the market for them to make a steady income.
Writing Ice Berg Ahead
It may shock some people when they find out that this was true before the saturation of the internet too. Michaele Crichton wrote over a dozen before he had a hit with the Andromeda Strain.
Bloggers
A blogger takes two to three years of consistent regular posting to get massive traffic and page views. The average blogger will post two to three posts a week every week during that time. When they suddenly become ‘known” they will likely have written over 100 to 150 articles a year to get there. A blogger will also have to master marketing, product development, the basics of how to make and grow a working email list or other financial support system and a how to run the blog itsaelf. That is a big project. None of it is visible unless they tell you like
Gary Vaynerchuk.
Copywriters
A copywriter promotes and writes dozens of spec articles and pieces till they start to land regular clients. Even then it’s not the dollar a word club. They get hosed at two to ten cents a word. Still they are better off than the novelist. They get paid for their practice. It is more than just building a large portfolio. There is also work to build a network for getting work and closing deals in the mix. It takes time to build those skills. The reality is your first year or three will be in the $3000 to $1500 a year level. However, after your credentials and skills are in place most tend to make $75000 to $150000 a year. If you stay in the game long enough $300000 a year is not unheard of. Like all other writers, the ones we hear about are the high skill end.
Reporters
Reporter will be a cub for a few years just learning the beats. Depending on the paper that can mean working for pennies till they can really start to work on the main stories and have collumns of their own. The big draw there is the steady nature of both the weekly paycheck and the daily work. For a writer the daily writing with a deadline is far more valuable.
Dues Paid
We often call this paying your dues. What it is going on is not just doing time on a cosmic hamster wheel. You are building your confidence. Repetition builds your skills, habits, and most of all your confidence. When you know you can crack out a thousand finished words in an hour or two and submit them on time for your deadline, that’s confidence. It’s more than just just knowing how fast you are. You know how to allocate your time for the background work you will need for research, client interaction, editing, etc…. you will need to get those words down on paper in those two hours. Confidence shows up when the process of getting the work done is no longer a mystery. You know how to start, keep going and finish. That is a confident working writer.
Resilience is the mental skill writers fall back on in the process of getting things done, regularly in large scale volume. Resileince is a byproduct of our condidence to bounce back from failure. It is as much habit as skill. In Jujitsu we say “Fall six times. Get up seven.” As long as you get up just once more than you fall, then you win. It’s that simple. That’s what becoming resilient is all about.
How do you practice?
How do you practice falling? Write more and get more out there. It’s not fancy. Nor is it new. It is a commitment to the mundane. Often that is what all writing is. We, to turn a phrase from Chet Scott of Built to Lead, “marry the mundane”. It’s not a fairy tail. It’s repeating our baisic habits over an over to master ourselves and our lives so that we can bring life to our work.
In writing I have found that keeping a perspective about failure is essential for trying again. We all fail in writing. I cannot think of a single writer, well known or otherwise who has not had a list of failures that far outstrips the wins. If they can get up every time, so can I…and you too. It just takes a little practice…maybe a lot. That’s where the commitment hits. I bet you know where I am going on this one again. Yep, that’s where the daily writing and finishing your work are again in play.
Nothing out there is going to improve your ability to be resilient more than getting out there with a new work and let the bodies hit the floor. This is how we learn. Not just with writing, this works with everything. The problem I have found is that at those times where I have had the strongest resistance to get up was when I did not listen to my higher mind set or gird myself with the wisdom of those who have gone before me. It has always been hardest to get up when I listened to that quit voice we all have or just as bad listened to the crowd of naysayers we all have.
The fact is the reason our critics say such negative things is that they don’t have the guts to do what we are doing. They may say they hate you, but in truth they hate themselves and are taking it out on you because you remind them of how bad they are messing up.
Talk to Writers
Whenever you meet those who are really working to get better, they will not be so negative about you. That’s because they are too focused on killing that dragon inside themselves to waste time doing the same to you. They also know that if they give you some encouragement there’s a biofeedback loop that will come back to them. Some call it karma. Others see it as positive thinking or optimism. The name does not matter in the least. When we give positive feedback to others, we feed two souls for the price of one gift. The biggest trick for confidence I have found is to give others some first. Then use that new confidence and resilience to shore up the first two habits and grow the process. Just an idea, but you might find it works for you when you try it.
Last Thought
On the writer’s path we keep working on our habits as much as our writing skills. They are just as important. Maybe more so since our habits are what will build our writing skills the most. Along the way you will find other habits to add or drop as you move along. Go with the flow. Look for answers in the mundane. Build the process. Trust the work. Love what you create. Rinse. Repeat.
Photo by Samrat Khadka on Unsplash