2007, at the age of 37, I finally published my first book. I started writing when I was 12 and it took me 25 years to finally finish and publish a book. That’s a long time. I was ecstatic to complete my lifelong dream, but I still felt like a failure.
Every now and then you read something, view something, or hear something that resonates in such a way that it prompts change.
You don’t know why exactly, or even that it is happening, but in time you realize what’s happened and you can pinpoint the exact moment it started.
This post is by Positive Writer contributor, Frank McKinley.
When I was a kid, there was no such thing as email. We didn’t have a family computer in the living room.
There were no cellphones either. In fact, the only mobile phones I saw were on TV detective shows (and those were only as mobile as the cars they were in).
So how on earth did we communicate with our faraway relatives in that primitive world?
Do you ever feel like you don’t measure up?
When you do something extremely well, better than you ever thought you could, do you tend to believe it was just a fluke?
I’m not going to tell you that you shouldn’t be jealous, envious, or that you should ignore how much better another person might be.
Go ahead, dare yourself. Compare yourself. It might be the best thing you ever do for your art.
Jeff Goins is a Wall Street Journal bestselling author of “Real Artists Don’t Starve,” and the teacher of one of the fastest growing online courses for writers, Tribe Writers.
Do you have a favorite blog about writing? Great! Nominate it for the Best Writing Blog Award 2018. (Announcement will be in January, 2018)
The Annual Best Writing Blog Awards is my personal favorite event of the year and your involvement is paramount. The annual award post is the most read post of the year and has reached millions of online readers who discovered fantastic new writing blogs to explore, bookmark and subscribe to, so please do take a moment and nominate your personal favorite.
Let’s get to it…
Note: This is a guest post by Joe Bunting. Joe is a professional ghostwriter and editor. He is the publisher of The Write Practice.
Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about how to edit a book. “I have a 60,000 word manuscript,” people tell me, “but I don’t know how to know if it’s ready to publish.”
Some of these writers want to finish up the manuscripts they began during NaNoWriMo. Others are in the middle of their first draft and are enthusiastically thinking ahead to their next steps.
However, they’re all asking the same question: How do you know when your book is finished?
Bloggers have the most difficult job any writer has, and it’s not just the writing, it’s consistently coming up with fresh and exciting ideas to write about.
I’ll be honest with you, constantly coming up with ideas is hard work. So it’s great to have a quick reference list for those times when you’re drawing a blank.
Are you a blogger of musings and other random things, believing the more well-rounded your blog is the better your chances are of attracting a larger audience?
I made this mistake, too. The good news is it’s fixable.