How to Build Your Best Writing Life in 2020
Photo by Brooke Cagle on Unsplash
Ready to bridge the gap between where you are and where you want to be in your writing life?
Last week, I published Build Your Best Writing Life, my first full-length book for writers. This book breaks down each of the essential strategies that have helped me slowly but surely work to become the writer I want to be over the past five years—strategies that are continuing to help me achieve this aim today.
With the new year upon us, it’s time we start taking action to turn our resolutions into realities. If it’s your goal to build a writing life you love in 2020, then I’d love to break down the foundational strategies I share in my new book with you today.
The process of building a writing life you love rests on four cornerstone endeavors:
Honing a healthy creative mindset
Building a writing practice you can sustain
Working with intention to improve your writing skills
Developing your road map to personal writing success
Why is each of these endeavors so important? And what can you do to achieve them in the year to come? Let’s dig into all four of these foundational strategies together, writer!
Strategy #1: Hone a Healthy Creative Mindset
Do you struggle to put pen to paper and finish your projects, despite wanting so desperately to write? Then you’ve encountered resistance; the internal force that weaponizes your doubts, fears, and limiting beliefs against you in an attempt to keep you from taking difficult action.
Make no mistake; writing is difficult work. There’s no writer in this world who doesn’t struggle to get words on the page from time to time—or most of the time, for that matter. But just because writing isn’t often easy doesn’t mean it can’t be joyous and fulfilling.
To access these positive feelings, you must lean into the difficulty of the writing life; you must pick up the pen and do the hard work. But how can you do so when resistance comes to call?
To oppose the pull of resistance, you must first recognize that doubt isn’t your creative enemy. Doubt is merely indicative of uncertainty, and you can always take action to resolve uncertainty in your writing life, no matter how big or small.
Doubt: Is that line not quite right?
Action: Restructure the sentence, and analyze your word choice.
Doubt: Is my writing good enough to land a book deal?
Action: Seek constructive criticism on your manuscript to ensure it is the best that it can be before you query.
Taking action to resolve doubt isn’t always easy. But the alternative is to allow resistance to twist your doubts into limiting beliefs such as “That line sounds so dumb. I’m a terrible writer,” or “I can’t compete with other authors. No publishing house will ever offer me a deal.”
Can you see how quickly limiting beliefs can derail your creative confidence?
If you’re already struggling with these or other limiting beliefs concerning your skills or stories, then it’s time to give yourself a pep talk. Listen to your thoughts. The next time you tell yourself something negative about your writing life, counter that limiting belief with a positive affirmation.
“I’m a terrible writer,” can become “ I’m as good a writer as I work toward being, so I’m going to work hard to improve my skills.”
“I can’t compete with other writers” can become “Writing isn’t a competition. There’s room enough for every writer and every story.”
When you counteract your limiting beliefs with words of truth and take action to resolve your doubts, you seize the high ground in the battle against resistance. You learn to cultivate the healthy creative mindset you need to build a writing life you love.
Strategy #2: Build a Writing Practice You Can Sustain
If you wait for inspiration to strike before putting pen to paper, you will forever struggle to become the writer you want to be. Inspiration is a powerful source of creative energy, but it’s also fleeting. Habit, on the other hand, can provide the consistency you need to make steady progress in transforming your writing dreams into realities.
When building a writing habit—or practice, as I often prefer to call consistent creative work—you must set boundaries you can sustain for months or years to come. Often, this involves prioritizing progress over productivity. Stephen King might write 2,000 words a day, but if this goal isn’t feasible for you, or if it would result in writing burnout, then it isn’t a practice you can sustain.
More often than not, the most sustainable writing habits focus on input rather than output. Can you devote 15 minutes a day to writing? Or 3 hours over the course of a week? Big writing gains be damned. Slow but steady progress is the key to long-term writing success.
Additionally, the more consistency you can build into your writing practice, the better. Work to create this consistency where you can. Can you write in the same place every time you pick up the pen? Or at the same hour? Can you listen to the same instrumental soundtrack or drink the same cup of tea?
These conditions might seem trivial, but they can trigger your brain to dive deep into the write frame of mind.
Strategy #3: Work With Intention to Improve Your Writing Skills
No one crafts incredible stories or perfect prose the first time they sit down to write. Like painting or playing an instrument, writing is a craft that can — and must — be learned.
Each time you put words on the page, you naturally become a better writer through practice. But you can improve in your writing more quickly if you work with intention to hone your skills. To achieve this aim, you can take several helpful approaches.
First, you can study the craft, learning how to develop well-rounded characters, structure your stories, weave themes through your narrative, and more. You can also read critically, analyzing the stories you consume to see how other writers craft (or fail to craft) compelling stories.
Another essential way to improve in your craft is to seek feedback from editors, beta readers, and/or critique partners. Often, you’re simply too close to your writing to recognize some of the areas in which it needs improvement. Receiving constructive criticism can help you bridge this gap.
But to intentionally improve your writing and storytelling skills most effectively, it’s important that you first define your strengths and weaknesses in the craft. Knowing where you would most benefit from improvement can help you work with greater intention to become the writer you want to be.
Strategy #4: Develop Your Road Map to Writing Success
There is no right way to be a writer. Though many writers dream of publishing a bestseller or building a career as a full-time author, these dreams don’t have to be your dreams.
To build your best writing life, you must identify what writing success means to you—outside of all the external influences that work to convince you that you can only be a “real” writer if you achieve X, Y, or Z.
So tell me, writer: What do you want from your writing life? It’s okay to dream big. Stake your claim on every wild fantasy you hold for your work. But take time to also consider your honest writing ambition; what you want for your writing life that is largely within your realm of control to achieve.
Winning the Newbery Medal or having your book adapted for film are possibilities, but you can’t make an action plan to achieve these goals.
However, you can create a plan to land an agent, build a thriving career as an indie author, or travel the world writing short stories in every country you visit.
To develop such a plan, a road map to personal writing success, consider the first major goal you’ll need to achieve. If you want to build a thriving career as an indie author, for example, you must first publish your debut novel.
From there, repeatedly break your goal down into smaller tasks until you reach a simple action step you can take every day or week. Then, place your focus on taking that action step alone. This is how you avoid overwhelm and slowly but surely turn your writing dreams into realities.
Write for 30 minutes every day, and you’ll one day finish the first draft of your book. Repeat this process to revise your novel, then spend time each week thereafter completing at least one publishing task.
Before you know it, you’ll be celebrating the release of your first novel. From there, simply recreate your writing road map with your next big goal in mind.
Creating your writing road map can provide the clarity and focus you need to achieve your personal definition of writing success. But at the end of the day, know that your best writing life isn’t waiting just over the horizon. It’s here; it’s now.
Your best writing life lives in your commitment to the craft, in the fulfillment you feel in wrapping up a difficult writing session, and in the joy of realizing that you’re a better writer today than you were yesterday. It’s in the privilege to pursue work you love, and the courage you exhibit in seizing that opportunity. In picking up the pen. In the simple act of writing.
