It could be that parts of your writing personality aren’t serving you.
In the spirit of Halloween, it’s time to tap into your inner murderer.
Dark thoughts are welcome here because you’re not going to be hurting anyone, not even yourself.
Instead, this is a cleansing process, an exfoliation of the parts of yourself that don’t serve you as a writer. The faster you can dispatch them, the sooner you’ll enjoy a rewarding writing life.
Writing Personality Trait 1. Little Miss Victim
She seems harmless enough. After all, she doesn’t do any real damage, she just complains a lot.
“Why do I never catch a break?” she whines. “Why do I have all these rejections? It’s just not fair.”
But this evildoer is more powerful than you may think. She’s mastered the art of making sure you never take personal accountability for your own writing career.
Instead, through her, you can continue to blame everyone else—the agents, the editors, the publishers, and the readers—for your lack of success.
As long as Little Miss Victim is around, she’ll continue to remind you of how the whole world is stacked against you and you’re powerless to do anything about it, so you might as well give up.
Don’t expect her to change because she won’t. Instead, she’ll hang around and continue to make you miserable.
Do the Deed: The only choice you have is to get rid of her as soon as you can. Try shoving her down the stairs and then bury her before she has the chance to complain about that too.
2. The Drill Sergeant
He’s at you constantly.
Did you write today? Get your blog done? Did you get that cover designed?
If not, why not? There is no excuse! You must do better tomorrow! Get going! Chop chop!
Though we all need self-discipline to succeed as writers, we don’t need a bully in our heads driving us to exhaustion. This bellowing beast will keep at it until you’re so tired and worn out you never want to see a pen and paper (or fingers and keyboard) again.
Writers must have downtime if they’re to enjoy productive careers. No writer can survive the “all work and no play” edict of the Drill Sergeant.
Instead, productive writing results from a combination of hard work and enjoyable play. One doesn’t exist well without the other.
Do the Deed: End this villain with a swift and sure method of murder. He has a military background, so you can’t mess around. A straight shot to the heart should do the trick.
Then replace him with a more balanced manager who will keep your good health in mind as you work hard toward your dreams.
Writing Personality Trait 3. The Beautiful Diva
Ah, she turns heads when she walks into the room. She’s successful, don’t think she’s not, and she’ll make sure everyone knows it through the image she portrays.
She’s a writer, which means she’s a delicate flower who must be given all kinds of leeway to nurture her creativity.
She certainly can’t be expected to keep a day job. That’s just too much to ask of a creative soul.
Instead, she must be allowed to sit and ponder the many facets of life as she wishes, wiling away her time on frivolous pursuits that seem to make her happy but in truth, leave her suffering from self-doubt and remorse.
The beautiful diva, you see, never actually sits down to a daily writing practice. Instead, she prefers to imagine what it will all be like when her books fly off the shelves, as she believes they surely will at some point in the future.
She daydreams of packed book signings and glowing reviews even as her story file remains mostly empty.
Though rather pitiful, this manipulative villainess has the ability to keep a writer from ever actually realizing his or her dreams. She knows that if she tricks the writer’s brain into imagining success is just a breath away, she will keep that writer from putting in the required hard work such success demands.
Instead, the two can daydream together about how it will all be until the writer is dead and buried and no longer has a chance to succeed in reality.
Do the Deed: The method of murder is up to you, but research shows it’s often best to drug the diva and dump her into the ocean with a stout weight around her slim ankle.
Once she’s down in the depths, get back to work.
Writing Personality Trait 4. The Noodle Man
It helps a writer to have others who support his or her writing dreams, but The Noodle Man takes it to the next level, making sure the writer cannot go on without the support of those around him.
As long as the writer’s partner, family, friends, and others continue to encourage and cheer him on, all is well. Should any of that support be removed, however, it’s The Noodle Man’s job to convince the writer of the impossibility of success.
It’s common for The Noodle Man to show up when:
- a writer shares a new idea his formerly supportive partner doesn’t like
- family members start to wonder how long “this writing thing” is going to go on
- friends get tired of hearing about the difficult writing life
Every writer has to stand alone at times. When you find yourself in that position, don’t be surprised if The Noodle Man takes advantage of the moment to try to make you quit.
If he can get you doubting yourself enough to put your writing aside, he will have succeeded.
Do the Deed: Your best option is to be proactive. At your earliest convenience, slice through his noodles with a sharp knife. He’ll wriggle around for a while, but he won’t last.
Once you’re free of him, make a point to build yourself up and support your own dreams on a daily basis. Your biggest cheerleader is in the mirror.
Writing Personality Trait 5. The Efficient Android
He does it all: writes, edits, designs, publishes, blogs, markets, surveys, gives away, and whips up a dynamite Facebook ad.
He’s read all the books and gone through all the courses and he knows exactly what a writer must do in today’s market to succeed. He knows what “the experts” say and he intends to follow their recommendations to the letter.
The problem with this villain is that he can quickly and easily sap all the fun out of writing. Allowed to continue with his dastardly deeds, he will eventually suck the soul of the writer right out of her body, so she begins to truly believe that the writing life is not for her after all.
No writer is an android. We can’t be expected to perform task after task in an unfeeling, robotic way. Writers who bend to the Efficient Android’s demands will soon discover they’re not programs and cannot go on doing activity after activity if those activities aren’t rewarding in some way.
Do the Deed: This one can be difficult to kill. You’ve seen the movies. The machines always come back. Be prepared to hack this one up a few times before it dies—an ax is good—and in the meantime, choose those parts of the writing life you enjoy and stick to them.
Writing should feed your soul, not drain it.
(For help developing book-marketing techniques you can enjoy, check out the award-winning book, Writer Get Noticed!)
Have you had to murder a few demons to succeed in your writing goals?