Your biggest battle as a writer

Believe it or not... it's not plotting

Hey, Runners!

Now that we’ve all got our journals ready to process the feels we get when we engage with our writing, we’re gonna start our mindset work by focusing on the biggest enemy any writer faces.

Themselves.

How you speak to yourself matters

I run a deeply scheduled, but also infinitely flexible, ship over at the Year of Writing Magically. The year is broken up into sections, and we generally keep to it—doing Discovery while we’re covering Discovery, and drafting (almost) every day while we’re Drafting, that kind of thing.

Every year, people fall off the schedule. It may be writer’s block, or life interference, or something at work ramped up unexpectedly and now they have less time than they thought they would. They get stressed and start feeling guilty, and that’s when their inner voice becomes an outer one.

They will reach out to me, calling themselves an idiot, or lazy, or naive for thinking they’d be able to write a book, etc. My response is always some variation on, “We don’t do that here. If you’re not writing when you want to write, there’s a good reason and beating yourself up will only delay you from figuring that reason out and getting where you want to be. If it takes you two years to write this story instead of one, then that’s fine. There’s no fail state here.”

This can sometimes makes them feel worse.

Question: Can you write a kind note to yourself in the comments with regard to your writing?

This is a very vulnerable question; if you can’t do it publicly here, please do it in a journal, or on a sticky note, or a white board. You can erase it immediately afterward; it’s the writing it that matters.

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Writer culture is steeped in Quit your whining and write. It tells you that writer’s block isn’t real, you’re just a lazy good-for-nothing, and you should stop even trying. You’re mediocre at best, anyway.

The subtext there being, Slink away if you can’t take it; no one will miss you.

And this is why I start every workshop with mindset work.

Look, it took me years to get past all of that stuff. I thought that by being tough on myself, I was helping myself. Many of my friends and I thought that brutally tearing apart each other’s work was how we showed love. There is a dark shadow of vicious self-talk in writer culture that is not only not helpful, it’s actively destructive. I don’t expect you to get over that in a day.

A year, however… well….

I bet you can get over it in year.