January 2019

We love shortcuts to success.

I can’t promise these will all be easy. But if you use them, I can promise you’ll make progress.

This post is by Positive Writer contributor Frank McKinley.

Momentum Requires Movement

Tomorrow is too late.

Momentum is like a fire. It needs you to feed it to live. And when it wanes, you’ve got to poke it to reinvigorate it.

Sometimes we confuse dreams with momentum.

“I want to write a novel next year.” 

“I want to become a bestselling author.” 

“I want to be the next James Patterson.” 

You could also add that you want to be the next person to fly to Mars.

Wanting isn’t doing. Dreams are great, but unless we pick up our pens, sit in our chairs, and write down some words, dreams are just smoke.

But Dreams Are Fun

So is visiting Disney World.

Or the beach.

Or your mountain cabin.

Dreams make sleeping memorable.

Action is what makes dreams come true. You’ve got to write it and share it to know if people will like it.

Will you fail? 

Maybe.

But only if you don’t learn something.

Tomorrow is another day. You can write something else. And as the days pass, you’ll forget about what didn’t work.

You’re a writer. Don’t just hypothesize. Test your assertions. Try them with real people. Something good will come from this eventually. You just have to keep putting words in front of people.

Here are the 7 hacks to transform you into an unstoppable writer!

1 Write down ideas whenever they come.

Keep a notebook or a page somewhere where you can record all those ideas that come to you.

If you can find them, you can do something with them. Maybe you use one and throw away another. Maybe you marry two of them and take a new slant on an old approach.

Just catch them before they get lost.

Writing them down ensures they stay.

You say you don’t have any ideas?

That’s a lie. Take out a piece of paper. Grab a pen. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Write the first word that pops into your head on the top of the page and spend the 10 minutes writing down whatever comes to mind.

Send your internal critic on a break while you fill the page with nonsense, profundity, and everything in between.

When you’re done, you’ll have something.

If you don’t like what you have, just do it again until you do.

2 If you don’t use an idea in a week, toss it.

Time kills momentum.

This approach may sound radical. But it’s not.

When you buy produce, you have to eat it soon or it will be rotten. When it’s rotten, you don’t save it for later, hoping it will taste better. In fact, the longer you keep it around the more it stinks.

Ideas are a lot like that. Act on them while they’re hot. Otherwise, you’re just stirring ashes.

You’re most creative when you write about something sooner than later. Later, you’ll have grown and maybe that thought won’t make sense anymore. Maybe you’ll have learned a lesson that made that idea irrelevant. A week is long enough.

If it’s a big idea, take some action on it now. Even if it’s just making plans. A long term project can take a year. There will be lots of parts. Small actions are movement that keep the idea alive.

Do something now to move that idea forward. If you can’t, you probably won’t.

3 Write daily and momentum will come, stay, and grow.

Your work won’t always be perfect.

In fact, it never will because it can’t be.

Don’t worry about it.

When a baby learns to walk, she doesn’t care about perfect. She cares about effective. She doesn’t care how she looks while she’s learning. She just cares about walking.

Write every day. Do the best you can. Do something better tomorrow than you did it today. But don’t spend all day today worrying about tomorrow.

Just pick up your pen and make some magic.

The trick is just doing the work.

4 Print out a calendar and record your progress.

It’s great to have an accountability partner if you can get one.

But honestly, you are your best motivator.

Hang a calendar on your wall. Get one in December if you can. If not, print one out on your computer. If you don’t have a computer, draw a calendar.

Every day, check the box to signal to yourself that you wrote something.

When you’re feeling like nothing you do matters, the calendar will remind you that you’re making progress. You’re writing. You’re testing the boundaries. You’re doing the work.

You’ll only reach your destination when you take the steps every day to get there.

5 As soon as you reach one goal, set another.

Just take time to celebrate your wins.

You’ve probably figured it out by now. I’m urging you to keep moving.

Life is meaningless without a map.

We all want maps because we all have dreams we want to come true.

Maps show the territory in front of you. Goals are the cities you want to visit on a map. You pave the road with the steps you take to get there.

NaNoWriMo is a great example of how this works. You have 30 days to write 50,000 words. You know you’re writing a story that you hope becomes a published novel. At worst, if you keep moving you’ll have a draft you can refine.

The key is:

• You know WHAT you need to write.
• You know HOW MUCH writing is required.
• You have a DEADLINE.

When that’s novel’s done, you write another one if you want to call yourself a novelist.

Writing every day is a goal. Writing a novel is a goal. If you want to move forward every day, you’ve got to set a goal every day.

Then you’ve got to do the work, which is far easier when you’ve drawn a map.

6 It’s great to have lots of ideas. It’s better to turn them into reality.

All your ideas won’t work.

That’s why you need lots of them.

You can also tweak your ideas and effectively turn them into new ones. Your pen is your friend here. Every morning play around with your thoughts. Take them in whatever direction your mind leads them to. There might be gold in the shadows.

You don’t have to publish and share all your thoughts. But you do need to explore the ones that stick around and keep popping up in your idea notebook. There’s probably a golden thread running through them that is calling you to your purpose as a writer.

It’s your responsibility to discover what that is, and take it to the people who need it.

Unrealized ideas are cinders that turn to ashes and never warm anyone.

Don’t let your good ideas suffer that fate.

7 Keep experimenting. It’s better to learn than to guess.

Seth Godin wrote the foreword to a marketing textbook I found online.

He wrote, “This textbook probably won’t be any good for you.”

Why would he say something like that?

Because if all you do is read it, you’ll be wasting your time.

Read it. Learn it. Then go do something with it.

Market.

Test.

Learn.

Build.

Reading this post won’t help you either. So go. Use what you’ve just read. Write something. Now. Today. Tomorrow. Forever.

Go Make Magic

The magic of writing is in the doing.

When you do it daily, and give it your all, you’ll get better. Your message will matter. And people will read your stories.

Your message is your story. It’s the hope you sell to your readers. It’s the secret that, when revealed, frees them to be their best selves, achieve the status they want, and make their dreams real.

What will you write today?