Welcome (or welcome back) to my writing journey!
How are you all doing?
A month ago I posted a note asking what people felt their biggest writing challenge was. I got a lot of different responses, and I’m going to try to address as many as I can in this post.
I’m not some sort of writing guru or genius, but I have overcome a lot of these challenges myself. The advice I will be giving is based on my own personal experience, and it’s what I did to solve these problems.
As always - there is no right or wrong answer here. It’s all about what works for you. If something I advise makes the problem worse, throw it out the window and keep looking for something that will actually help you. We are all different. Don’t do something just because I said it helped me. If it works for you — amazing. If not — keep searching for something that will.
Sitting down and actually doing it
This is a tough one. There could be any number of reasons you have trouble with this. I give specific advice on being under pressure and not being able to focus later on. If either of those are the issue, read on. If not, here are some other ideas.
Sometimes, as a way to protect us from doing something hard, our brain will start shooting thoughts at us about all the things that need to be done. And they all need to be done immediately. While procrastinating from doing schoolwork I’ve cleaned my entire apartment, cooked for the week, done other assignments due later, gone grocery shopping, and so much more. Literally anything other than what I needed to be doing.
A solution you can try is to just sit down and do it anyway. This sounds kind of dumb and useless, but I’ll explain. This is a trick your brain is playing on you and you need to recognize that. Once you have, you’ll realize you can just power through, and if it’s important enough to you, you’ll succeed. It’s not easy at all. At. All. However, it can be done.
Look your brain in the eye (my, what a strange sentence) and tell it that you’ve had it with its tricks. You see what it’s trying to do and you won’t stand for it. Then, sit down and write. Keep a piece of paper next to you so that when your brain tells you that you absolutely need to do thing XYZ right now, you can write it down and then just go back to what you were doing. This lets you acknowledge what your brain is trying to tell you, which will make it a lot easier to let go of, and also keeps you from forgetting what it was in case it was actually important.
Doing the writing can be really hard. It's a long process, and it’s not as exciting as having the idea. The only advice I can give is to push through and do it anyway. Imagine how it’ll feel to have a finished novel. Use that feeling to motivate you. It’s tough, but you can do it.
Being under pressure to get things done
The right amount of pressure can be a great motivator, but too much pressure can lead to shutdown. The magnitude of what you have to do can be overwhelming enough that it paralyzes you, and you end up doing nothing.
My advice is to break down what you need to do into a lot of really small steps. Focus on one of them at a time, and pretend the rest don't exist. This helps lessen that feeling of overwhelm and allows you to focus on doing what you need to do.
Break down the big scary task into little bite sized chunks. Think about how long each chunk will take, and then break it down further if you think it’ll take more than 10-30 minutes (depending on how long you can work on it without feeling overwhelmed). Then space those chunks out over however much time you have until your deadline. The most important thing for this method to work is that you ignore the existence of the big scary task as a whole, and you ignore the next steps while you’re working.
Getting someone to read your work
It can be really tough to find people who will read what you wrote. It can feel uncomfortable and nerve-wracking to ask people you know to read what your work. Especially if their opinion matters to you. Because if they don’t like it you’ll feel bad about yourself on a personal level, or if they refuse to read it completely you’ll feel bad because you just got told that your passion project wasn’t worth someone’s time. It’s a veritable minefield.
There is, unfortunately, no easy fix, and your best course of action will differ greatly based on who the people in your life are.
If you’re trying to find readers online, it’s a lot easier. The emotional aspect is mostly out of the picture, and even though getting rejected is never fun it’ll feel a lot less personal when it happens.
The best advice I have is to just keep writing and putting out quality content and people will find you. Even if it feels like you're screaming into the void, keep going. Your people will find you. It may take a long time — it took me a very long time, but it will happen. There are billions of people who use the internet. Someone will find your work and like it, you just have to give them time to find you.
Getting feedback
Getting reader feedback is one of the harder things to do. In real life, finding someone who will give constructive criticism is quite difficult. Not many people know how to, and many can’t even be bothered to try. Depending on who the people in your life are this could be nearly impossible. You might just have better luck online.
That’s not to say that getting it online is easy. If we look at substack as an example (it’s a good one, and maybe your best bet anyway), it’s not a walk in the park here either. I’ve seen posts with thousands of views, thousands of likes and 32 comments. It’s crazy. But people on here do comment and the more exposure you get the more feedback you’ll get.
I’d suggest engaging with other writers, because showing up for them may help them and others show up for you in the future (and it’s also just a nice thing to do). Substack is an amazing platform. Most of the people on here write or love writing, so the support is amazing and the engagement is very high. Publishing here feels less like shouting into a void than on other platforms, which is nice. With time, you’ll hopefully see an increase in feedback and readership.
Time (too much or not enough)
Finding the time to write is a really big challenge. That's why I set a goal of writing for 10 minutes a day. Everyone can find that much time, and once you start writing often you will continue for a lot more than the ten minutes. Even if you don’t, you’ll still be making progress in your writing. I can write about 250 words in ten minutes, and if I write every single day for a week or a year that becomes a significant amount of writing.
It was very difficult at first to actually write during those ten minutes, but now that I’ve been doing it for a few months my brain has gotten the hang of it, I can get right to writing. I know what I did the day before, so I can just pick up where I left off. A tip I heard that may help you if you struggle to do that is to write one sentence about what you’re going to write the next day, at the end of each writing session. This way, when you sit down to write, you know exactly what you’re supposed to do and you don’t have to spend any of your ten minutes thinking about it.
If you have too much time and struggle to choose what to do with it, I think planning may help you. Sit down and make a list of every single thing you need or want to do, break that down into smaller tasks, and then rank them by importance. Then, either just start from the top and work your way down, or randomly choose a task each time. This gets rid of the option fatigue and overwhelm from having too much time, and lets you just get to writing without having to think too much about what to do.
Writing for yourself, without thinking of the potential gain
I've been trying to avoid thinking about writing as a career. Not because I wouldn't love for that to happen, but rather because it would corrupt the joy I feel while writing. If writing becomes a job, personally that would suck all the happiness and enjoyment out of it. Instead of writing because I love writing, I’ll feel like I have to write because of the consequences I’d face if I didn’t. This might change later in life, and it also would not be as true if writing were my secondary source of income as opposed to my primary source.
That’s not to say that I don’t want to make money from my writing. If it ends up happening — that would be amazing. But if not, that's also okay, because I'm still pursuing something I'm passionate about. Making money would be a wonderful bonus, but I don’t want my life hinging on it.
If you feel the same way, shift your mindset away from making writing your career. Write for the sake of writing, for the sake of your enjoyment, and treat any money you make as a bonus.
Not looking back on old writing and making yourself feel bad about it
I actually don’t go back and read my old posts at all. I’m proud to have posted them, they were good for their time, and now I’ve moved on to something else and I don’t look back.
My advice would be to try accepting your old writing for what it is, but not go back and read it. Keep your eyes firmly forward and work on making your next piece of writing great.
Be proud of what you were able to achieve in the past, and recognize that you’ve made progress since then. Be kind to your past self, and try to be better in the future.
Focus and not succumbing to “shiny object syndrome“
Whenever I sit down to write, I get a slew of brilliant new ideas that I must write about immediately. It's really hard not to abandon my primary wip to focus on the shiny new ideas.
My main method of focusing is to not try to shut out the chaos in my mind, but direct it instead. So if I’m working on writing project A, and I have ideas for project B or C, I just add notes to their part of my writer’s notebook. This has the double benefit of keeping me focused on project A, and also having tons of notes and ideas for projects B and C that I can use when it’s their turn to be written.
Writing a longer story, not running out of plot
My best piece of advice is to plot ahead of time. When you plot your story two things happen — you figure out whether the idea you had can actually support an entire novel, and if it can, you know all the points it has to go through to reach the end.
The plot you create is not set in stone. If you feel your story is taking you in another direction when you actually start writing, that’s totally fine. But at least you came up with a possible way through your story, so that at every point you know what direction you need to be heading in to get to “the end“.
Is your biggest writing challenge something I didn’t cover? Let me know in the comments and I will try to help. If it was, is there something I said you’re going to try to implement?
Talk soon :)
Shira
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Battling my inner demons and finding the strength to continue with them whispering in my ear is my biggest challenge. https://curiousleaders.substack.com/p/allow-yourself-to-suck-f3b24e7f8367?r=2ldy4w
This is such a great post! Lots of great advice and ideas. Thank you for sharing. I just found the love for writing a few years ago and recently decided to share it on this app. It’s a slow process but I’m learning along the way.