Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer -and What To Do About It Part 9
Reaching escape velocity means finding a fuel powerful enough to blast us out of the grip of a gravitational field and into free space. In the 1963 comedy film The Mouse on the Moon, characters from the fictional European duchy of Grand Fenwick discover that their only export, wine, is adaptable as a highly effective rocket fuel which they then use to become the first nation to land upon the Moon. The wine is so powerful that it isn’t necessary to punch through the atmosphe
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer - and What To Do About It Part 8
Inertia is defined by the dictionary as ‘a tendency to do nothing or to remain unchanged’. The word comes from ‘inert’, which means ‘lacking the ability or strength to move' and is derived from the Latin word iners, inert- ‘unskilled, inactive’, from in- (expressing negation) plus ars, art- ‘skill, art’. It’s probably true to say that writers who suffer from a lack of time to write, and from procrastination, do so because they are pinned down in their lives by a set of circ
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer - and What To Do About It Part 7
The writer’s biggest enemies (verified by survey) are Lack of Time, accompanied by Procrastination. I’ve argued that any perceived lack of time can actually worsen the procrastination problem: as Time seems to become scarce, the focussed passion that accompanies the deep-felt need to write can become so intense that many writers back off from it. Rather than ‘take the plunge’ and use the precious hour or two that has become available to unleash their passion, they find them
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer -and What To Do About It Part 6
In the previous article in this series - a series which, by the way, is available as a free e-book so that you can use it as a reference - I asked you to write down what you want to communicate. This is quite different from what you want to write: you might be full of desire to write a space fantasy, or a love story, or a vampire novel, or the world’s funniest Western, or whatever, but that’s not what I mean. Great authors have something to say. Whether they ever sat down l
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer - and What To Do About It, Part 5
You want to be a writer - for real, not just part-time, not eking out desperate moments of writing after hours, but fully functioning on all your ‘cylinders’ as what you were always meant to be. Big changes probably need to be made. Do you remember when you were small being afraid to do something which, as a grown-up, is now commonplace to you? Perhaps you were scared to go into a dark room, or to go upstairs by yourself, or later, maybe you were terrified to sit behind t
Your Biggest C hallenge As A Writer - and What To Do About It, Part 4
If you’ve read the earlier articles in this series, you’ll know that the biggest barriers for writers, according to survey results, are Lack of Time and its companion Procrastination. You’ll also know that to fully handle these barriers you will need to make significant changes to your lifestyle so that your writing takes centre stage and everything else fits in around it, rather than the other way round. Then you need to write. You need to write copious amounts of unforg
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer - and What To Do About It, Part 3
In the last couple of articles, we’ve seen how the writer’s biggest challenge, by survey result, has to do with time and procrastination, and that this really isn’t going to be solved completely by those short-term remedies which enable a writer to eke out a few minutes here and there to get something onto the page (though those kinds of things help to relieve pressure, like first aid). What’s needed to defeat procrastination and time issues completely is an almost total re
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer - and What To Do About It, Part 2
I once worked as a management consultant in the heart of London. I had an office just off Berkeley Square in Mayfair, and would occasionally take clients for tea at the Ritz Hotel just down the road. I remember walking across Green Park one spring day - the trees were turning green, the deckchairs were out, and I was on my way to an interview with the BBC regarding a programme that I was involved with which wanted to introduce a post-communist Russia to principles of manageme
Your Biggest Challenge As A Writer -and What To Do About It
I recently did a survey of writers, asking them what their biggest challenge was in relation to their writing. A few answered that they were struggling with marketing, or with story quality or self doubt or even grammar. Each of these categories amounted to 5% or 10% of the total answers. But by far the largest proportion of writers - over 60% - revealed that their main difficulty was related to two connected things: time and procrastination. These writers told me that th