The Advantages of Acting Vs. Reacting In Your Writing Career

Acting vs. reacting: What are you more likely to do in your writing career?

If you’re like most writers, you’re spending far too much time reacting and not enough acting.

Here’s the difference, and how you can start acting to create much more success for yourself.

Acting Vs. Reacting for Writers: What’s the Difference?

When you act, you make a conscious choice to do something, then you follow through. You choose based on your principles and goals, and you become powerful through that choice.

When you react, you respond—often emotionally—to something outside of yourself. Something happens and you react to it without thinking.

By doing this, you often give up your power. You’re letting someone else or some outside circumstance determine what you will do and how you will respond.

When you act, you almost always do something that is in your best interests. In this case, in the best interests of your writing career.

When you react, usually the outcome is negative. It may feel right in the moment, but the long-term result isn’t good.

Let’s look at some examples that apply specifically to writers.

Examples of Acting vs. Reacting in Writing

Action: Setting up a writing schedule and sticking to it no matter what. You feel powerful and on purpose.

Reaction: Letting someone else’s “emergency” interfere with your writing time. You feel frustrated and powerless.

Action: Setting up a book blog review tour, signing up on NetGalley, or reaching out to readers individually to get reviews of your new book. With everyone that comes through, you feel like you’re moving forward.

Reaction: Launching your book with no plan to get reviews, then reacting to the low numbers with discouragement and anger.

Action: Deciding to write for 15 minutes a night no matter what, even if you have a long day at work. Within a month, you have finished a chapter. This feels motivating.

Reaction: Letting your demanding job lead you to believe that there’s no way you can write a novel right now. You feel defeated and discouraged.

Action: Researching several publishers and setting up a schedule of submissions. When you get one rejection, you send the story out to the next one on the list.

Reaction: Sending one submission out and when it’s rejected, feeling bad and discouraged and deciding to quit writing.

Acting vs. Reacting: How the Cycle of Reaction Works

It’s best to avoid reacting as often as you can.

Not only because reacting usually leads to negative outcomes, but because reacting can set up a vicious cycle of more reactions.

Let’s say you get a bad review on your story. Rather than choose to take positive action in response (reach out for more reviews to balance out the one negative one), you react to that review by sending the reviewer a stern response.

The reviewer reacts and sends you back an angry response.

You react and send an angry response of your own.

You can see where this is going. Nowhere good for your reputation as a writer.

Here’s another example. You set up a schedule to write every day at lunch for 20 minutes. You do well for three days. On the fourth day, you’re interrupted by something important and you have to forego your writing time.

The next day, you react to the discouragement of missing that writing time. You’re behind now. You don’t remember where you were in the story. You react to those emotions and decide not to write the next day either.

On the third day, you’re feeling even more discouraged and distant from your story. Wanna guess what will happen?

Reacting sets you up for more reacting, which leads you down a negative trail. Instead, you have to break the cycle and take action.

Acting vs. Reacting: The Cycle of Action

The good news is that you can set up a cycle of action just as easily as you can a cycle of reaction.

All you have to do is choose action in any particular moment.

Let’s go back to that day you were interrupted at lunch. You could choose to take action and write after dinner that night. You get the 20 minutes in and you feel more motivated. That will lead you to be more likely to write at lunch the next day.

Or let’s say you get that bad review. You choose to act by reaching out to a book blog review tour or BookSirens review service to get more reviews. With every new positive review that comes in, you’ll be more likely to continue your marketing efforts.

You see, every time you act, you’re rewarded in some way. At the very least, you’ll feel proud of yourself for making a choice that supports your writing career. But most of the time you’ll get more than that—pages built up in your novel, more reviews, and more motivation for your work.

Reaction, on the other hand, is frustrating. You respond to some stimulus and most of the time you feel worse afterward. At the very least, you’ll feel powerless.

Action spurs more action. It’s the way to writing success!

Acting vs. Reacting: Results vs. Excuses

Have you ever heard someone say they want to write, but then give you all their excuses for why they don’t?

That’s a person being reactive.

A reactive person has excuses for why they didn’t get the writing done. They didn’t have time because of A, B, and C excuses. They didn’t submit their story because frogs are green or whatever the reason. There are no results. There is no progress.

An active person, on the other hand, will produce results. Every time you consciously choose to write, submit, market, or expand your platform, you will produce something as a result. It may be successful or not. If it fails, you’ll learn from it. If it succeeds, you’ll have given yourself another step up.

Either way, you have made progress.

Acting vs. Reacting: How to Tell

How can you tell if you’re acting or reacting in your everyday writing life? Here are some signs.

Signs You’re Reacting

• You’re feeling negative emotions.
• You’re responding to something that happened outside of yourself.
• You’re reacting to what someone else said or did.
• Your responses seem automatic—you didn’t think about them beforehand.
• You have the feeling that your “buttons” are being pushed.
• Your actions, at best, don’t help you and may hurt your progress toward your writing dreams.

Signs You’re Acting

• You’re deciding to do something based on what you value.
• You’re taking charge.
• You feel empowered.
• Your actions are accompanied by positive emotions.
• Your actions are purposeful.
• The actions you take push you toward success.

How can you tell whether you’re acting or reacting in your writing life?