How To (finally…) Become A Writer

Release your brakes and start today

Confessions Of A Procrastinator

I’m a high achiever on many traditional metrics, but throughout my life, I’ve had tremendous difficulty overcoming procrastination and actually completing, at least when it comes to creative work.

Maybe you have that problem too?

Well, if you’re reading this right now, it means I’ve finally taken enough action and overcome my hang-ups well enough to put something out into the world that could reach your eyeballs. So I guess I finally did it! That makes me a qualified authority, at least on how to get yourself to also take that first step.

I’m an author now. So yeah, sure, I can teach you how to become an author.

It’s been a long time coming too, lemme tell ya. When I was a kid, I imagined I’d make a million dollars as a best selling author by the time I reached 40. Talk about procrastination! I have only one year left, but in the neighborhood of about $999,999 still to go, assuming I can hit my target of making $1 dollar on this article.

So anyway, let’s dive in and figure out which of my hang-ups are also holding you back. Once we figure out what’s stopping you, we’ll talk about releasing those psychological e-brakes so that you can finally make some progress. I have a lot to talk about thanks to my Ph.D. in Procrastination. So let’s play doctor. Tell me where it hurts. (Seriously-I’d love to hear which of these you have a problem with in the comments!)

The Perfectionist’s Trap

There’s a YouTube video by The School of Life that I’m not going to link to right now because I want you to finish reading this rather than getting endlessly lost in Google’s distracting algorithms (more on that later). But the video is something I’d play for my beginning algebra students, and they’d love it even though it had nothing to do with algebra. Or maybe because it had nothing to do with algebra.

But at any rate, the video drives home the point that to seek to emulate the work of an expert is profoundly intimidating. When you go to try to attempt your own work, inevitably it is a steaming pile by comparison.

But when you see other people’s work and feel inadequate, you must remember that you’re only seeing the tip of the iceberg. You don’t see the countless hours of tears and toil and crumpled drafts beneath the surface that went into producing that finely crafted work of art.

In order to become the kind of creator who is capable of producing the book or article that inspired you to want to give it a go, the person you look up to had to put in an outrageous level of sustained effort and practice.

And so will you.

You can set your near-term targets to be very modest and achievable, like the goal I have of making $1 off of this article. That seems possible. The bigger goals, like making $999,999 more, should be far enough in the distance that they can be big without seeming impossible. You can practice to build yourself up to them.

Impostor Syndrome

This is insidious, but you can reach your goals, get the acclaim you worked so hard for, and yet still feel unworthy of success even though you know how hard you worked.

Yeah, I know. It’s messed up.

That worry that you’re not good enough and that people will figure out that you don’t really belong there robs you of your fulfillment in life, it spoils the treasures the universe has put right in front of you on a silver platter.

So, what’s my fix?

Gratitude. It’s tough to feel gratitude and fear at the same time. Can you remember getting the birthday gift you were hoping for as a child and how great that felt? It wasn’t about whether you “deserved” it or not, it just felt great to get something you wanted, even if it was small. Remember that feeling, make it vivid, and relive it as often as you can. Don’t just do affirmations, try to relive the memory and associate it in your mind with what you need to do.

To cite a super-nerdy reference that in a paragraph that I should probably leave out, be like one of the hosts in Westworld that experiences reveries. Except deliberately pick the awesome moments of your life to have flashbacks of, instead of visualizing your nightmares. You can learn gratitude as a skill, and if you do then that’s going to scramble your brain’s fear response, which is where Impostor Syndrome lives. Meditate on what you are grateful for.

Some people get to that state of mind by feeling gratitude to God. You can often hear sports figures thanking God, and giving Him all the credit for why the ball went through the hoop or between two posts. Now maybe that makes perfect sense to you, theologically speaking, and you can’t understand why anyone would be skeptical. Or maybe it sounds just a little bit silly to you (especially if you’re the point guard that “God” just dunked on). But either way, don’t judge — learn. The obvious success and ecstasy those individuals reliably experience proves that they’re on to something.

The power of gratitude is that “something”. There are a lot of ways to train yourself to be oriented towards gratitude rather than fear. For me, Stoicism and meditation have been the main tools, and I’ll be writing about those a lot more in future articles.

Originality

Related to the above, I’ve often felt as if I had to make a unique and original contribution to the world in order for that to be worthwhile. The problem is, most original stuff isn’t very good (nor are most imitations, in all honesty). That’s why they didn’t stop after only 10 sequels of Friday the 13th: it’s easy to come up with new stuff, but it is hard to come up with new stuff that becomes iconic and really gains traction. A murderer in a hockey mask? That seems to work, so keep making another, and another, and another, right?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that, just like there’s nothing wrong with someone who wants to be an entrepreneur to start by flipping burgers in an after-school job. Nothing is beneath you when you’re starting, particularly well-traveled paths that you already enjoy.

If you want to start by writing fan fiction in a world that’s already well established, or if you want to write summaries of your favorite books, as I plan to do, these are very good exercises. And they can even have an actual monetary value. This may not bring you the motherlode of glory and riches like inventing your own world from scratch could, but if it is a world you already love, why not develop and explore it your own way?

Or if nonfiction is your plan, then as Jim Kwik says, “when you teach something you get to learn it twice”. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, instead try to incorporate all the lessons of those who have come before you and teach these to your audience in your own style. “Those who can’t do, teach” has a lot of ways that it can be interpreted. Teaching isn’t something you get to do only after you become a master at something. Teaching is part of your own learning process in becoming the master.

Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.

— C.S.Lewis

So don’t set your target as originality, and don’t set your bar as writing the great American novel on your first outing. You build up to that. In the same way that you wouldn’t expect to paint the Mona Lisa the first time you pick up a brush, or chisel David the first time you sit down in front of some marble, don’t expect to just bleed out onto the page and suddenly come up with War and Peace or Moby Dick. But it is worth noting that even those masterworks are not springing forth out of a vacuum. They are authentic expressions of well-practiced creators drawing from real experiences and observations, and also the work of past masters.

Distraction

This is the biggie for our era.

So about the remaining year that I have left to make my $1 million? There’s a reason why I’m optimistic enough to mention it twice now. For the past 20 years, I’ve been stuck in park no matter how hard I rev my engine because I’ve spent countless hours trapped in a computer gaming addiction. But I’m finally free of that distraction.

Okay, it’s not really “countless” because Steam actually logs the time spent, and I’m not really “free” either. I’m not even going to risk reactivating my account to check.

True, I’ve been “clean” a year and a half, and haven’t played a single mission of Skyrim or fought a single battle in Total War. But I still don’t trust myself at all yet.

I was literally writing this particular section when I became conscious of the urge to check Facebook and realized I was already midway through starting a new tab. It’s like I was on autopilot. The part of me who cares about keeping the ship afloat realized what the impulsive side of me was doing and, screamed “wait!” at my subconscious. I closed the tab before finding out if there are any new notifications, thank goodness. I’ll count this one as a victory for Team Jesse, but suffice it to say that the struggle continues, and not all of the members of me, myself, and I are quite on the same page.

Recap

• Dream BIG in the long run, but set small achievable daily goals
• Your current skill level is the worst you’ll be. Practice and you get better!
• Be grateful for success as it comes, without worrying if you “earned it”
• Doesn’t matter if you’re “original”. Remix what exists, in your own style.

So what are the techniques I’m using to keep myself on the straight and narrow? I’m going to write several articles just on this one topic too, but one thing is that Identity can be powerfully helpful in this. I keep bringing up my future status as an ultra-successful millionaire author because it eloquently answers the question of what I need to do when I feel lost or overwhelmed and tempted towards a vice. Would the person I want to be waste his time endlessly swiping through Tik Tok, or watching the latest fan theory on YouTube about Darth Vader’s respirator? No, he would not.

That millionaire writer that I intend to become would write.