Archive for the ‘creativity’ Category

5 More Ways for Writers to Market Themselves

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

There are two schools of thought on mar­ket­ing and writ­ing.  Some think that mar­ket­ing can lead to great suc­cess, or that mar­ket­ing alone is respon­si­ble for the suc­cess.   Dan Brown is some­one I hear this accu­sa­tion levied at from time to time.  Others will argue that no amount of mar­ket­ing will make a bad story good.  Bad in this case gen­er­ally being bland and bor­ing. I waf­fle back and forth between these opin­ions depend­ing on the writer and how jeal­ous I feel, but ulti­mately, I ascribe to a syn­the­sis of the two.

Talent and genius are not all that is required to suc­ceed in writ­ing.  Sure, they’ll take you places a lot of the time.  But there’s a prob­lem that doesn’t have any­thing to do with how good you are.

There are a lot of other tal­ented peo­ple out there doing work just as good, if not bet­ter.  And they’re all vying for the atten­tion of the same peo­ple you are.  Sure, you can seg­ment the mar­ket a bit, and nar­row your niche, but ulti­mately, we’re all look­ing for read­ers, and there are only so many (and appar­ently grow­ing fewer by the year).  Forget the national deficit, we’re run­ning one hell of an atten­tion deficit these days.   Luckily, there’s no short­age of appetite for good sto­ries.  Human being are vora­cious con­sumers of the stuff.  But each per­son is pre­sented with a ver­i­ta­ble buf­fet of choices, and until they try a dish, they have no idea if it will be any good.  It’s  such a big buf­fet that they might not even know your dish is down there, next to the green bean casse­role and the can­died yams.  They may fill up on bread.

Okay, I’ve stretched that metaphor as far as it will go.

Writers don’t want to be sales­peo­ple.  If we wanted to be sales­peo­ple, we wouldn’t be writ­ing. There are no short­age of jobs for sales­peo­ple.  Maybe you’ll win the pub­lisher jack­pot and get a great mar­ket­ing deal with your three book con­tract.  Or maybe your publisher’s inter­nal process will hic­cup and the book sell­ers won’t really know what your book is about, and will have a hard time push­ing it to the chains and you’re dead on arrival.   Or, maybe you’ll pub­lish in high qual­ity, but some­what obscure mar­kets that not nearly as many peo­ple read as you might wish.

A lot of the time, the work falls to the writer to mar­ket them­selves and their work.  You’ll have help along the way, from the edi­tors and pub­lish­ers who buy your work, but not always.  Then you need to step in, and mar­ket yourself.

It’s a bad word though, isn’t it?  I feel slimy just for even say­ing it.  I’ve had to come to terms with the notion that what I do isn’t really infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy any more so much as it is a form of mar­ket­ing.  I have the neg­a­tive stigma attached the idea as well.   But I’ve come to know some excel­lent and effort­less self-​​marketers in the writ­ing world, and it’s con­vinced me of the over­all value.   They had the tal­ent first, but even tal­ent can use some help.

I’ve talked at length about how to use your website/​blog to mar­ket your­self.  I’d like to dis­cuss some alter­na­tive meth­ods, or at least tan­gen­tial ones.  So with­out fur­ther wind-​​up, here are a few more off-​​the-​​wall mar­ket­ing ideas for writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  Use at your own risk.

  1. Get Em Young

    Volunteer as a speaker for your local school sys­tem.  This will prob­a­bly go over best when you’ve got some cred­its to your name that you can show to teach­ers and admin­is­tra­tion.  Offer your ser­vices, explain that you would love to talk to kids about writ­ing.  Bring along age-​​appropriate free sam­ples (ARCs, mag­a­zine issues, and so on), and give it away to the kids.    Hey, if you’re a genre writer, you’re not only doing your­self a bit of a favor, and help­ing kids, you’re also increas­ing the expo­sure of the genre as a whole.   So it’s good mar­ket­ing and it’s just good karma too.

  2. Twitter Away

    You already know about Twitter, right?  I’ve blath­ered on about it enough.  Here’s the thing… Twitter is infected with self-​​marketeers, mar­ket­ing gurus, and all man­ner of social snake-​​oil sales­folk.  The Twitterati can smell a mar­keter from a mil­lion miles away.  I can tell from a glance at someone’s stream whether or not they’ve basi­cally cre­ated a Twitter account to blare about their work, or prod­uct, or what­ever.  They’re not sub­tle.  You need to be sub­tle, and you do this by not being an ass­hole. Twitter’s for social­iz­ing.  This means you talk to other peo­ple, you lis­ten, you par­tic­i­pate.  You don’t use it as a broad­cast medium.   It’s cool if you plug things now and then, really.  But retweet stuff too.  Answer replies.  Tell peo­ple how cool they are.  Be a gen­uine human being. And stay the hell away from any­one telling you that they have the sure-​​fire method of gain­ing you 16,000 fol­low­ers in 24 hours.  That stuff has to be bogus.

  3. Become an Expert (or share your exist­ing expertise)

    This goes back to some­thing I wrote about yes­ter­day, which is that I believe writ­ers should have pas­sions out­side of writ­ing itself.  Few of us make a liv­ing at this, and I hope some of us have day jobs that we kind of like.  So, make your­self an expert on your pas­sion, and share it with oth­ers through online media.  An audi­ence mem­ber is an audi­ence mem­ber, and no, I don’t have any hard fig­ures to sup­port the notion that a blog reader turns into a book buyer, but a blog reader is one less per­son who has never heard of you.

    Call it becom­ing an expert, or estab­lish­ing author­ity.  Either way,  you do so by offer­ing some­thing of use­ful­ness to other peo­ple.  Like I have been so des­per­ately attempt­ing to do with this blog for the past sev­eral weeks.  You can do this by a blog, but you can also do this via find-​​an-​​expert sites.  Join a com­mu­nity around the sub­ject and be help­ful to oth­ers.  Project good energy out and it comes back to you, I have found.

  4. Manufacture a Controversy

    Tension sells in fic­tion and it sells in real life too.   And I’ll be damned if this doesn’t actu­ally work some­times.  Now, whether or not you do this depends on whether or not you think any pub­lic­ity is good pub­lic­ity.  Manufacturing a con­tro­versy, even if your out­rage is true and heart­felt, can back­fire.  Controversies inher­ently bring emo­tions to the table, and dis­cus­sions can turn into flame wars in a sec­ond when emo­tions are at the table.    I’ll be hon­est.  I wrote some of the things I wrote in yesterday’s post because I knew some peo­ple would take excep­tion to them, to the degree that they would be com­pelled to write a reac­tion.  That’s not to say I lied, because I believed what I wrote at the time.  But I knew that the “hook” of what I was writ­ing was that some peo­ple would dis­agree with me.

    In the end, I feel bad about it though, and I won’t be using it as a blog­ging tech­nique again unless I’ve put a lot of thought into my posi­tion.  Nick took me down yes­ter­day in about fif­teen min­utes, and gave me trou­ble, right­fully so, for not research­ing before I wrote.    So if you want to man­u­fac­ture a con­tro­versy, keep that in mind.  Do your research and make sure you feel strongly about your subject.

  5. Forget Everything I Just Said

    Sometimes, the best mar­ket­ing a writer can hope for is to be a nice, help­ful, gen­uinely inter­est­ing per­son.  Someone who gives as much as they receive, and who loves meet­ing and talk­ing things over with new peo­ple.  Those peo­ple do well because they earn it.

    I’m try­ing to be that kind of per­son, but I’m also twit­ter­ing, shar­ing my exper­tise (what lit­tle there is), and some­times, not nec­es­sar­ily by acci­dent, man­u­fac­tur­ing a con­tro­versy or two.  To the point where I don’t get nearly enough writ­ing done out­side of the blog.

    I hon­estly write these posts out of a desire to be help­ful, and to feel like I am engag­ing in the com­mu­nity around me.  If I’m try­ing to mar­ket any­thing, it’s my ser­vices as a free­lancer.  I don’t have a book and my short sto­ries are rare lately.  Maybe the best pol­icy for a writer regard­ing mar­ket­ing is hon­esty and authenticity.

So what do you think?

Writers Should Not Blog About Writing

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

We’re writ­ers, so we should write about every­thing, right? Not if we care about main­tain­ing an audi­ence, we shouldn’t.  Despite our deep-​​seated belief that every thing that hap­pens to us and every thought we have is inter­est­ing to oth­ers, some things writ­ers like to blog about are just plain bor­ing or, worse, por­tray them in a neg­a­tive light.  I’ve learned most of these because I’ve done them and dri­ven off read­ers with them, so don’t think I’m set­ting these down as reminders for oth­ers.  They apply to me dou­bly so.  They include:

  • Your rejec­tion let­ters.  You can use them to illus­trate a point, but blog­ging “rejected by F&SF, 8 days” isn’t very inter­est­ing.  Also, it makes you look kinda like a schlub when your blog is full of rejec­tion let­ters.  Your read­ers only need to know when you have new work com­ing out. They don’t care how many agents turned you down, or how many rejec­tions you gath­ered along the way before the sale.
  • Your word count for the day.  Good for you, seri­ously.  I know some peo­ple use this as a kind of social rein­force­ment, but per­son­ally, I can’t stand look­ing at a blog and see­ing noth­ing but a long list of short posts talk­ing about what you wrote that day.
  • Your favorite snip­pet from your work-​​in-​​progress.  Out of con­text, it isn’t nearly as neat or inter­est­ing as you think it is.  Publish the story and we’ll bask in the glow of your genius then.
  • Grammar.  Snore.
  • In gen­eral, the craft and daily tra­vails of being a writer.

I firmly believe that writ­ers should be inter­est­ing for some­thing other than being a writer.  It’s a rare indi­vid­ual who can be scin­til­lat­ing to the gen­eral pub­lic while talk­ing about the sausage-​​making of writ­ing.*     If you’re a writer, surely you’re pas­sion­ate about some­thing other than writ­ing.  Blog about what­ever that is.

Look at it this way–who is your tar­get audi­ence?  The sub­ject of writ­ing is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers.  They are not nec­es­sar­ily the read­ers you want, because there are not very many of them.  If your goal is to col­lect a fol­low­ing greater than a few hun­dred peo­ple, then you need a sub­ject of broader interest–even just the genre that you write in is more inter­est­ing than the act of writ­ing itself.

Clearly I am not fol­low­ing the advice of the last point here. I write about writ­ing for a good rea­son, and that’s because my free­lance busi­ness caters to writ­ers.   Writers are my tar­get audi­ence for these posts, so I am com­fort­able with it.  As I com­plete my busi­ness web­site, these kinds of advice posts will tran­si­tion to that site, and my per­sonal blog will become more, well, personal.

*Exempt from this advice are writ­ers with stag­ger­ing read­er­ships, such as  Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi.

ETA:

Nick Mamatas has this to say in the com­ments, and it’s a strong point:

The sub­ject of writ­ing is inter­est­ing to other writ­ers and aspir­ing writ­ers. They are not nec­es­sar­ily the read­ers you want, because there are not very many of them.

Crazy talk. There are mil­lions of aspir­ing writ­ers, and thus an indus­try to ser­vice them—several monthly mag­a­zines, a plethora of how-​​to books, sem­i­nars and con­fer­ences, over 100 degree-​​granting pro­grams in the sub­ject, etc.

Aspiring writ­ers also tend to read more widely (and deeply) than non-​​aspirants. Aspiring writ­ers are cer­tainly a large audi­ence worth cultivating.

So I  took this advice much fur­ther than I should have.  And I should point out that my advice was aimed squarely not at writ­ers who blog as a kind of per­sonal jour­nal.  I aim it at peo­ple who are look­ing to delib­er­ately and method­i­cally grow an audi­ence.  If you’re writ­ing a per­sonal jour­nal style blog, but want to use your blog to grow an audi­ence, I thnk you need to think about tran­si­tion­ing the kind of con­tent you post.

5 Rejection Horror Stories

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Rejection hor­ror sto­ries are like the camp­fire ghost sto­ries told to other writ­ers in hushed tones, per­haps over drinks at a hotel bar, but more likely over an email or instant message.

No, that’s not right.  Unlike ghost sto­ries, which seek to strike fear in the lis­ten­ers, these hor­ror sto­ries are meant to make us feel bet­ter.  The hor­ror comes from what was rejected, how it was rejected, and who was rejected.

I think most writ­ers, espe­cially those just start­ing out, col­lect these sto­ries to act as ward and charms against the fear of fail­ure that so often plague us as the rejec­tion let­ters mount, even those who have been writ­ing for decades.  Here are some of my favorites:

1.  Ursula K. Le Guin’s famous rejec­tion letter

The whole is so dry and air­less, so lack­ing in pace, that what­ever drama and excite­ment the novel might have had is entirely dis­si­pated by what does seem, a great deal of the time

The book being rejected?  The Left Hand of Darkness, a book that sub­se­quently found a pub­lisher and then went on to win the Nebula and the Hugo.   Read the full rejec­tion let­ter on Le Guin’s website.

2. J.K. Rowling’s long march to publication

Daughter Jessica was three-​​years-​​old when Joanne sent off her first fin­ished man­u­script. “Into the enve­lope it went, off it went and back came a very prompt response, say­ing ‘No, thank you.’ And then I got another rejec­tion let­ter. “The funny thing is they didn’t upset me because I had that back-​​against-​​the-​​wall men­tal­ity. By this time, I was on a teach­ing course. I knew I was going to have incred­i­bly lim­ited time to write and I just thought, ‘Well, even if what you end up with is a file full of rejec­tion let­ters, you know you tried.’ “The first agent sent me a let­ter back say­ing, ‘My client list is full’ – lit­er­ally! “No ‘Dear Madam’ and no ‘Yours sin­cerely’, and if I sound like I bear a grudge, I do because I’d sent my man­u­script in this beau­ti­ful plas­tic folder and I was broke and I didn’t have £5 to spend on a plas­tic folder and she sent it back with­out the folder and she wrote, ‘No, thank you.’ And with a hand­writ­ten PS, ‘The folder you sent would not fit in the enve­lope.’ And I just felt, ‘Well, buy big­ger envelopes, then.’ I was furious.

Even the best-​​selling series in recent mem­ory was rejected numer­ous times by agents and edi­tors. The truth is, something’s great­ness is not read­ily appar­ent.  You just have to keep look­ing until you find some­one who believes in your work as much as you do.  And if you don’t believe in your work utterly, why are you even both­er­ing to sub­mit it?

3. Flowers for Algernon– Gold’s Rewrite Request

As part of the larger essay “Thus Our Words Unspoken” (1994), Malzberg relates the story (as told by Robert P. Mills) of how Daniel Keyes’s clas­sic story (and one of the best SF sto­ries of all time) “Flowers for Algernon” came to be pub­lished, and pub­lished in F&SF. It seems Keyes had sub­mit­ted it to Horace Gold at Galaxy. Gold said he would pub­lish it only if Keyes made one cru­cial change: that Charlie not end up an imbe­cile at the end of the story, but remain a genius. Keyes refused and trunked the story. Then, on a shared train ride with F&SF edi­tor Mills, Mills asked Keyes for a story. Keyes thought imme­di­ately of “Flowers” and began to describe it to Mills. Mills found it inter­est­ing, asked to see the ms., and upon read­ing it wanted to pub­lish it … with one change. Keyes, assum­ing the worst, begged Mills not to ask him to change the end of the story. Mills said no, that the change he wanted was to add a girl­friend for Charlie. Keyes, relieved, agreed to the change, and we all know the rest of the story.

Dave Truesdale recounts this story, which I think is a good para­ble about stick­ing to your vision.  If you sac­ri­fice your vision for the sake of being pub­lished, then what’s the point?  Be per­sis­tent, but polite, but also will­ing to accept change sug­ges­tions from an edi­tor that makes sense.  Most of my sto­ries have been made bet­ter by an edi­tor.  But I’ve also turned down rewrite requests that I didn’t feel were in-​​line with what I wanted to do.  I lost money, but I felt bet­ter about myself.   But good lord, could you imag­ine a Flowers that turned out the way Gold wanted?  It would have been a travesty!

4. Brandon Sanderson– 13 Failed Novels

“I spent nine years try­ing to get pub­lished.  During that time, I wrote thir­teen nov­els.  I even­tu­ally sold the sixth, Elantris, and got a con­tract from Tor for another tril­ogy after Elantris.”

Brandon Sanderson is the cho­sen one, lit­er­ally, picked to fin­ish the long-​​running and unfin­ished Wheel of Time series.The man wrote a baker’s dozen of nov­els before sell­ing one! Can you really argue that stick­ing to it and being per­sis­tent doesn’t pay off in the face of that fact?

5.  Just about Every Other Author You’ve Ever Heard Of

Stephen King’s Carrie was rejected for being “dystopian.”   Rudyard #*(@ing Kipling was rejected and informed that he didn’t know how to use the English lan­guage!  Dr. Suess?  Too weird.  H.G. Wells War of the Worlds?  Too scary and dreadful.

If there’s a writer who has never once received a rejec­tion, I haven’t met him or her.  Everyone gets them.  And they suck, I won’t deny it.  I’m lax about sub­mit­ting my work because they tend to ruin my day, but even still, I know I shouldn’t let them.  They don’t mean much of any­thing beyond one editor’s (or maybe a cou­ple), or an agent’s opin­ion.  Have some faith in your work.  Keep at it, try­ing to get bet­ter.  One day, that rejec­tion let­ter you’re expect­ing will turn out to be some­thing entirely different.

Special thanks to John Joseph Adams for help­ing me find cita­tions for some of these famous rejec­tion stories.

Personal Interlude: A Project Awesome update

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

When I’m too busy to write a nice, well-​​thought out blog post ahead of time, then things are actu­ally going pretty well.

Project Awesome launched a month and a day ago.  Since then, I have had no more suc­cess in find­ing a job than before, but every­thing else has improved dra­mat­i­cally.  Freelancing is going very well, with enough work to cover a cou­ple of months, and I haven’t even mar­keted myself.

Rule #1 has been good.  I have lost my tem­per a cou­ple of times and shared it online, mostly deal­ing with com­puter fail­ure.  For the most part, I believe my atti­tude por­trayed online has improved very much–you’ll have to let me know if you don’t think so too.  I don’t always feel great, but I keep it to myself., which leads me to rule #2.

Rule #2 has prob­a­bly had the most amaz­ing impact on me out of every­thing.  When I start to feel down, I remem­ber this rule and push onward.  In no time, I go from fak­ing feel­ing good to actu­ally feel­ing good.  My writ­ing has improved and my design skills have improved because I have decided to pre­tend I am great even if I don’t think I am.

Rule #3– I don’t think I’ve bro­ken this rule.  Nobody owes me any­thing, except my clients, and I take paypal :)

Rule #4– def­i­nitely.  As I exper­i­ment with dif­fer­ent top­ics for posts on this blog, I’ve failed at gen­er­at­ing inter­est with some.  But I take it as a learn­ing expe­ri­ence, and it’s help­ing me tai­lor where I want to go next.

Rule #5 & 6– sharp­en­ing my tal­ent is pretty much my dri­ving goal in every­thing right now.  I’m see­ing fan­tas­tic results, I think.

I do like work­ing.  Even with­out a job, I find work.  Things are fine.

All the rest, I think have been mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful as well.

To sum­ma­rize, I feel much bet­ter, and I feel like I’m mak­ing real progress in my life goals thanks to Project Awesome.  Opportunities keep com­ing, despite the dire sit­u­a­tion of being laid off.   Right now, I don’t miss the grind of an office job at all.  My stress lev­els are lower than ever.

If it weren’t for the insur­ance issue (which I have yet to resolve), I could do this indefinitely.

I hope you’ve been enjoy­ing the blog.  I will  get back on track with reg­u­larly sched­uled high-​​quality posts tomor­row and over the weekend.

7 Strategies for Making Time for Your Creative Pursuits

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

it’s my under­stand­ing that there are some peo­ple out there that still have a job and have fam­i­lies they like to spend time with. I’ve heard of such peo­ple. But seri­ously, once, I had a day job too. I do have a fam­ily I love to spend time with. So I know a lit­tle bit about how hard it is to find time to do the things you really love while spend­ing a lot of time doing the things you have to do to make every­thing else possible.

Making time is an inter­est­ing turn of phrase. It almost implies that if we just con­cen­trate, we’ll man­i­fest extra min­utes or hours out of noth­ing. The truth is, every day has 24 hours, 1,440 min­utes, 86400 sec­onds. Except for those weird days that don’t because of time changes. We’re not going to be mak­ing any more time. We have to make do with the time we have.

Being a suc­cess­ful cre­ative pro­fes­sional, whether you’re only doing it on the side of a big­ger gig, or you’re a full time free­lancer, requires some unique time man­age­ment. There are a mil­lion meth­ods out there, a mil­lion tools, all about how to man­age your time effec­tively. There’s a rather large pseudo-​​cult around “Getting Things Done.” I’ve exper­i­mented with it, but I didn’t find that it was the right man­age­ment sys­tem for me. I wanted some­thing a lit­tle more organic, and some­thing that takes into con­sid­er­a­tion that some of us have jobs where we’re actu­ally expected to be on email more than an hour a day.

I’ve yet to hit upon a par­tic­u­lar method­ol­ogy that works for me, but var­i­ous tips and tricks have col­lected in the recesses of my brain in the time I’ve been doing this. Here are some of the strate­gies that work for others:

  • The Early Riser: get up before any­one else in the house does, stum­ble to the com­puter, and work before you brain even fully comes online.
  • The Late Night Insomniac: wait until every­one else in the house has gone to bed, and then get your work done before stum­bling off to bed.
  • The Minutes Stealer: work a lit­tle here, a lit­tle there. Have a daily goal, and squeeze out what time you can in places. This kind of spo­radic approach.
  • The Lunch Breaker: most peo­ple with full time jobs get lunch breaks. An hour to yourself–if you don’t have errands that need to be run, and you can prac­tice your cre­ativ­ity with­out spe­cial instru­ments– is valu­able. It’s built right into your day. This some­times means giv­ing up a meal though, which I’m against on prin­ci­ple. You can’t sac­ri­fice your health for pro­duc­tiv­ity. They’re not inter­changable cur­ren­cies in the long run. You’ll get shorted even­tu­ally, some­times badly.
  • The Sacrificer: Like to play games with friends? Or do you like to watch a lot of TV? Sacrificers give up TV or video games in order to ded­i­cate that time to their art instead.
  • The Vacationer: some peo­ple will take time off from their job, hole up in a room, and pound out a project in a week or two weeks. Believe it or not, some peo­ple can write a novel in that time frame, but I sus­pect they do a lot of plan­ning and research ahead of time, and use the vaca­tion time purely for get­ting words on the page, ink on paper, paint on can­vas, etc.
  • The Unemployed: you have all the time in the world! Except now that you don’t have a job get­ting in the way, you have errands to run con­stantly. Errands mul­ti­ply in the absence of a job, it’s ridicu­lous. Being unem­ployed, so far in my expe­ri­ence, doesn’t make it any eas­ier. You still have to fol­low the basic strat­egy, which is this:

All strate­gies involve tak­ing time you already have and retask­ing it to your new purpose.

There may be some peo­ple whose lives are so absolutely full of jobs and fam­ily that they lit­er­ally can­not spare any time for their art, but I doubt there are many of them. Most of us have time some­where in our lives. It’s just a mat­ter of iden­ti­fy­ing the time and com­mit­ting it to the use you desire most.

Do you use a strat­egy to make time for your work that I haven’t men­tioned above? Share it with us in the comments.

Forcing Creativity

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

Some will tell you that it’s not pos­si­ble to force cre­ativ­ity, or that the results from “forc­ing” cre­ativ­ity are sub-​​par to the work that “just hap­pens.”  I’m here to argue the opposite.

For some cre­ative folks, such as myself, sit­ting around wait­ing for inspi­ra­tion to strike, for the mood to be right, and for the stars to align is a recipe for get­ting jack shit done.  We will write off our lack of pro­duc­tiv­ity by say­ing some­thing like “I just don’t have any­thing to say” or “the muse isn’t with me today.”  I’ve used both of these excuses even recently to myself.

Hogwash.  The truth is, noth­ing moti­vates me more than a dead­line that has some teeth to it.  A good exam­ple was the Federations anthol­ogy.  I knew about it for months, and I had pid­dled around with a cou­ple of ideas.  Nothing really set­tled out, though.  The dead­line was lit­er­ally 48 hours away when, the idea of los­ing a good oppor­tu­nity to sell work to a favorite edi­tor hit me.  I didn’t want to miss out on an oppor­tu­nity like this, and that was before I knew which lumi­nar­ies of the field are in the book.   With that dri­ving me, I wrote “The Culture Archivist” and sent it to first read­ers.  Got it back, revised it again, and sent it to JJA.  It went through some edi­to­r­ial revi­sions, and then it was in the book.

The truth I must admit to myself is that I am a cre­atively lazy per­son at times.  I want it to be easy.  And it’s not.  It never gets any eas­ier.  You just get bet­ter at it.  But you still have to over­come the same iner­tia that was there when you first started out.  That takes a com­bi­na­tion of willpower, and if you can man­age it, discipline.

This holds true for every cre­ative endeavor  of mine, whether it be pho­tog­ra­phy, writ­ing, or design.  The hard­est part is just get­ting started.  And you have to force your­self to start.  Because if you don’t even get started, you’re not bloody well likely to fin­ish it, are you?

Force your­self to cre­ate using any means nec­es­sary. Some of these might work:

  • Ask your spouse or sig­nif­i­cant other to with­hold sex until you fin­ish.  Double motivator–you’ll want it done and your spouse will be really encouraging!
  • Go on a bread and water diet until you reach your ini­tial goal. (Do not do really do this, seri­ously.  Eat healthy.)
  • Use an inter­net block­ing pro­gram when you work on the com­puter.  These are usu­ally time based, but I sus­pect that 4 hours or so with­out the inter­net will get some­thing writ­ten and/​or made.
  • Instead of the stick, try the car­rot.  Promise your­self a $50 shop­ping spree if you fin­ish the work, or a night out for dinner.

External forces have always been the best moti­va­tor for me, but with many projects, there’s no exter­nal force.  As a free­lancer, I don’t have a boss beyond the client, and the client isn’t always moti­vated them­selves to fin­ish the project.  So it’s impor­tant for free­lancers to learn to self-​​motivate.

A desire to cre­ate some­thing great is often not enough moti­va­tion.  Sometimes, you have to prod your­self into get­ting started.  But once the ball is rolling, it tends to stay in motion for as long as you can afford the time.  For me, the sin­gle best thing about cre­at­ing things is los­ing myself in the process.  Time becomes mean­ing­less and my left-​​brain takes a nice long nap.  Call it what you will–the zone, in the moment, or some­thing else– it’s one of the great­est rewards of being a cre­ative per­son.  That plea­sur­able expe­ri­ence is almost rea­son enough to make things.  The fin­ished prod­uct is just a bonus sometimes.

What are some meth­ods you use to moti­vate your­self when you have the desire, but not the will?  How do you keep your­self on task?  Share your meth­ods with us.

Tomorrow, I will talk about strate­gies for mak­ing time to make things around a busy life.