Frustrated with your writing? This will help.
In my early twenties, when I first started taking my writing seriously, I consumed writing advice like I’d been walking the desert for forty days and just found a well.
I read countless author interviews, went to conferences, bought workbooks, and filled my ears with podcasts. They all asked the same questions––What’s your writing process? Where do you get your ideas? What inspires you?––but each author interviewed had wildly different answers.
Write every day. Don’t write every day. Write it out by hand first. Type it on your computer. Don’t be afraid to stop and research as you’re writing. Save the research til the end. Get a room of your own. Just go to a coffee shop. You need an MFA. Move to New York City. Join a writer’s group. Just focus on yourself. Get feedback as you go. Don’t even tell people you’re writing until your manuscript is done. Work a job you hate and write in the evenings. Quit your job and write all day. Wake up early to write before the rest of the house is awake. Stay up late to write after everyone has gone to bed.
All the conflicting advice made my head spin. And everyone giving the advice was a successful author, so what they were saying clearly worked for them. But how was I supposed to talk all that and figure out what would work for me?
I talked to dozens of other writers and learned I wasn’t alone. That was when it hit me: it’s not more writing advice that people need and it’s not necessarily their habits that need to change. What needs to change is the mindset people bring to their writing. As long as writers approach writing like it’s a system or a formula to be hacked, something that can be solved by finding the one simple piece of writing advice, they’ll always be frustrated with their work.
What if I told you writing could come easily and naturally and that’s how it’s supposed to feel?
That’s why I created Change Your Writing Mindset, Change Your Life: How to Take Your Writing Mindset to the Next Level in 29 Journal Prompts.
Rather than telling you do this, do that, the journal prompts are designed to help you
dig deep inside yourself and get in touch with your intuition to help you find the writing practice that works best for you.
investigate the assumptions and long-held beliefs you have about writing and figure out whether those are actually serving your creativity or holding you back.
reframe and rid yourself of thoughts, assumptions, and beliefs that keep you from producing your best work.
generate new ideas, resurrect old ideas, and leave you feeling inspired to move forward with your story.
The prompts work for fiction, nonfiction, and poetry writers, so it’s especially helpful if you write across multiple genres.
And because there are 29 journal prompts, you can do one a day and work through the exercises within a month.
I struggled to publish anything until I got my mind right. For less than $5, you can save yourself a lot of hassle, anguish, and frustration.
If you ask a thousand writers what their writing process looks like, you’ll get a thousand different answers. Writing advice is often conflicting because each writer’s process is so deeply personal.
If you’re looking for a blueprint on how to write, you’ll find plenty, though it’s possible that none of them will work for you. There’s no one right way––there are thousands of right ways.
At the end of the day, it’s not writing advice you need. It’s a shift in your writer mindset. You need to think about writing differently. Rather than seeing the writing process as a series of steps or a process you need to hack, or even habits you need to cultivate, the magic happens when you can understand writing as a theory so you can build your own practice instead of relying on the practices of others. When you approach writing with a healthy, productive mindset, you can more easily tap into your own intuition and find what works for you.
This book is about how to think differently about writing as a whole because when you change the way you think and get your mindset right, doors open up, inspiration is easier to find, and you see possibilities where before there were none.
At the end of each of the 29 essays in this book there’s a journal prompt. The prompts aren’t designed to generate content that you’ll publish later, though it’s possible that may be the end result. Rather, these prompts will help you do a deep dive on your attitudes about writing, publishing, and even yourself so you can have a better, healthier relationship with your craft.
This book is divided into three sections: Mindset, Wisdom, and Sustain. Mindset helps you investigate commonly held beliefs about writing so you can dismiss the beliefs that don’t serve you and write new stories for yourself. Wisdom contains writing advice that will make you think differently about your craft as a whole and give you insight on opening yourself up to vulnerability so you can better connect with your readers. Sustain focuses on how to stay strong amid discouragement and peer pressure, as well as how to keep your writing practice going, even when it feels like it’s going nowhere.
