It’s here. The new Year. A blank calendar to fill with good resolutions and, a lot of days ahead to forget about them and screw it up like every year. And it is that you always propose the same thing; you are going to go running, you are going to lose weight, you are going to be cooler, you are going to sing more rancheras, you are going to be a better writer… And every year, on December 31st, you realize that you have failed miserably.
Surely, you are thinking that I am a very cruel person and that I like to put my finger on the wound. Sorry to tell you, but you are more right than a saint.
Gabriella Campbell takes small steps
Recently, because of Gabriella Campbell, I read The Kaizen Method . One of the first things this book tells us is that most people fail their New Year’s resolutions for 10 years in a row. What are they supposed to be doing wrong? Not preparing their minds for change .
Kaizen is based on preparing our minds for change. Rather than stop eating chocolate, the book tells us to throw out just the first bite. A month later, you can do the same with the first two bites. In this way you overcome the brain’s resistance to change.
It’s about taking small steps. Instead of trying to do something big and revolutionary, we need to focus on taking small steps that, with patience, will lead us to success. Or to a less embarrassing failure.
It is a good book and I recommend it, especially if like me you have trouble focusing on things and need to improve some aspects of concentration and productivity . Those small steps, end up revealing big changes.
A paradigm shift
Well as I went. Most resolutions fail in the first month. Surely you have asked yourself: And why is that? Well, according to Kaizen it’s because you’ve bitten off more than you can chew.
You start with those changes and within a month you realize that you cannot continue. Before the end of January you have failed. You feel frustrated, you curse the universe for making you so lazy or for giving you such a cubist face, you raise your hands and yell at a deity who ignores you. Change is useless! Life is cruel and futile! Shame takes hold of you, followed by guilt over failure, and ultimately the calm of inactivity.
Before you know it, a new year has passed and the cycle begins anew. Like in the Lion King, it is the cycle of life, but here, in real life, the hyenas will eat you if you don’t wake up.
What if there was a way to break that spiral? What if there is a way to escape recurring failure? Sometimes you need to take small steps to reach your destination. What if you made a mistake when measuring results?
Measure what matters
Last week I read an article by a colleague, Yon Salgado, on his blog, summarizing his year as a writer. When I saw their numbers I threw my hands to my head… A real madness. The guy, in a year had finished a novel of 180,000 words, another of 70,000 and is involved with another in which he already has 30,000, in addition to his blogs that total 45,000 … Yon, he is an animal of numbers. It is the Yog Sothoth of the written word.
When I saw those numbers I got depressed. During the past year I finished many stories – between all of them they will make about 50,000 or 60,000 words – and two novelettes of 20,000 words. That added to my blog and collaborations … Anyway, my numbers were bloodless if compared to the titanic figures of my friend Yon … What have I done wrong?
Well many things. First, compare myself to him. Each writer has a rhythm and a process, you should never – never, under any circumstances – compare yourself to others . And secondly, I haven’t measured what really matters: What goals did I want to achieve in 2016? Basically I did not propose any. That’s how lazy I was.
My goal during 2016 was to finish commissions and do nothing more than my non-literary work. For this reason, once I had finished the stories and the novelettes, I did not write anything.
Change your goals as a writer
Stop thinking of years as a sprint race. Instead of thinking that this year you are going to write a novel, how about you consider writing 500 words a day?
Writing a novel can be a goal that you never achieve. You may lose the thread of the story, run out of ideas, or you may lose interest. If you fail, you will enter that spiral that I have already told you about. However, writing 500 words a day is something you can do . It is easy to achieve, you just have to sit down to write every day. It may cost you a week, a month or 21 days as they say. But it is a simple and achievable goal.
Sometimes all you need to get started is to put on
You see the difference? Our purposes are always based on reaching a specific goal, in this way our brain is put into competition mode. If we do not achieve that goal, our brain becomes frustrated and we feel that we have lost the competition. Your brain doesn’t care about effort or process.
It is as if you wanted to get from Madrid to Rome without important the gasoline you have in the tank. Of course, you will never get to Rome like this. Instead of doing that, focus on the process, plan each stop, find the best route, the one with the fewest curves, the one with the best roads… You will arrive in the end.
This is very simple: if you work, you will achieve results.
The Kaizen of the Writer
As a expert ghostwriter you have a lot to learn from these little steps. There are no magic formulas here. You just have to do the job. Stick your ass to the chair, put your fingers on the keys and start pounding like your life depended on it.
Oddly enough, that’s where most people fail. They never start writing. They always have something better to do: watch TV, play video games, watch the nuptial dance of an Afghan fly, count the cracks in the ceiling … Some – the most reckless – even dare to talk about writing and even read about writing! !
But they never sit down to write …
How does being a writer work
Last year you set out to write. You convinced yourself that it would be a different year. You were going to finish that novel, to write a lot more on your blog. You were even going to raze the Nanowrimo.
But you failed. Why? Because you wanted to bite off more than you were able to chew. You wanted to swallow the elephant in one bite and that never works with writing.
Now I’m going to reveal a great secret about writing. One that you will not find in any blog. I am going to give you the magic and secret formula, which was revealed to me in a dream by a being of light and which I have put into practice since I started with this. You are ready?
You have to write word for word.
You sure weren’t expecting it.
When it comes to being a writer, you can’t — or shouldn’t — set goals in terms like “novels” or “books.” You just have to write. You have to do it in small steps, because writing works like that, little by little.
Don’t sit down to write a novel or a book. You sit down and write a word, which together with others form a sentence. Then several sentences form a paragraph. Several paragraphs together create a section. When we have a few sections we can make a chapter and with a few chapters we have a novel or a story or whatever.
But it doesn’t appear overnight. You don’t hit the keys and create a book or a novel. You have to write little by little.
You can’t control the result, but you can control the process
Right now, as I write this, I have just finished my fifth novel and am picking up an old novel that I had dead of disgust. This is a very ambitious project, it is a novel that is unlike anything I have written so far. Something that, if it turns out well, will be the best thing I’ve written since I started. And I am very scared.
I’m screwed up with this project. I am so afraid that I have been paralyzed for two days, avoiding going to work. What should I do? Forget me? Let fear overcome me and not write? Think about what my readers will say?
This project has me in carbonite for several days
Well no, you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to sit down and write 500 words every day. In the end, as you will see, typing is simply sitting down and hitting the keys. You have to stop thinking about the record, forget about the numbers. Just worry about the process.
500 words a day
As I know that I am not the only one who ends the year frustrated by not writing as much as he wants, I have created this little challenge in which you can participate: write 500 words a day. The challenge is very simple, you just have to commit to writing 500 words a day, without more. It is not worth reviewing or editing, you just have to write .
I’ve created this challenge to encourage you to write more and to achieve your writing purpose. For the challenge I have created a Facebook page that you can enter. There you can share your progress every day and encourage those who participate.
They say that to create a habit you have to repeat something for 21 days, so for now our challenge will be 21 days.
How does it work
If you want to participate, you have all the rules on the page that I have created for the challenge and that you can visit by clicking on this LINK.
If you want to change the dynamics and have a purpose that you can achieve this year, join the 500 words challenge . Together we can have a year of productive writing.