The Secret to Making This Year Your Best Writing Year Yet

Want to make this your best writing year?

Do one thing: take more action.

Of all the things you can do to increase your odds of reaching your goals, this one will by far have the greatest impact on your future.

Simple, yes. Easy? Absolutely not. If it were, more people would be doing it, yet surprisingly few do.

“The truth is,” says motivational guru Jack Canfield, “while most of us know a lot about earning money, making things happen and bringing about change in the world, only a surprising few get to have all the abundance, glory and satisfaction this world has to offer—simply because they are the select few who consistently take action.”

Find out why it’s difficult to take action on a consistent basis, and how adopting this one habit can make it virtually impossible for you not to succeed.

Best Writing Year: Why It’s Hard for Writers to Take Action

Writers are really good at talking about what they want to do. We have big plans, and we love thinking about them, analyzing them, picturing how they will go, and sharing them with others. Because we have good imaginations, we enjoy regularly indulging them to fantasize about a future when all our big plans come to fruition and everything in our lives changes for the better.

The problem is that most of the time, talking and imagining and analyzing is all we do. Somehow we never around to actually taking action on those ideas and plans.

Here are five common reasons why that happens:

1. Writers don’t know what action to take.

To take action, you have to know what action to take, and unless you’ve done some critical thinking and planning, you’ll remain stuck in first gear.

Let’s say your books aren’t selling, and you want your next book to do better on the market. How do you do that? You’ll have to research the subject, discover some methods to try, and then plan out how you’ll implement those methods. Only then can you actually take action on them.

Of course, this requires you to take action in actually researching and planning. If you’re stuck in feeling frustrated about those poor sales, you won’t get any further.

Best Writing Year Problem 2. Writers don’t know how to take action.

Let’s say you know one of the things you need to do to increase book sales is improve your Amazon keywords, but you don’t know how. So you remain in limbo and nothing gets done.

If you lack the knowledge or skill to take an action step, you have to take action to increase your knowledge or learn that skill. Until you do, you’re stuck.

3. Writers secretly want to stay in their comfort zones.

Usually if a writer isn’t taking action, there’s a secret payoff for her lack of action. Not learning about Amazon keywords, for example—a topic the writer may find to be boring—allows her to avoid a boring activity.

Though the writer may sincerely believe she wants to improve sales, she’s not willing to step out of her comfort zone and do something boring to make it happen, so she fails to progress toward her goals.

Best Writing Year Problem 4. Writers doubt themselves.

Maybe a writer knows what action to take, and has the knowledge and skills to take it, but fears if she does, she will fail. Particularly if the action requires she try something new, fear is likely to be present.

Any action carries with it the risk of failure. Writers who get stuck in self-doubt are lacking the courage they need to stick their necks out. Taking action also means you risk being flat out wrong. Once you take the action, you could realize in hindsight it was the wrong action to take. As long as you keep thinking about it, your mind can convince you you’re right.

5. Writers know taking action is often difficult.

Most of the time, taking action to better ourselves or our careers is not easy. We can break it down into simpler steps, but still, it requires effort, and most of the time, we’d just plain rather be doing something else.

There’s also what author Steven Pressfield calls “resistance,” which crops up whenever we’re trying to push ourselves beyond our current boundaries. It’s like a physical force trying to keep us exactly where we are, and it takes energy and willpower to break through it—energy and willpower we don’t always have.

Whatever’s holding you back, as long as you don’t take action, your career will go nowhere. How can you become a more consistent action-taker?

7 Ways Writers Can Make This the Best Writing Year Yet—By Taking More Action!

Fortunately, you can become a consistent action-taker if you’re willing to make a few changes in how you approach your writing career.

1. See overthinking as a bad thing.

Writers are good at thinking, and we see that as a positive thing. It’s what leads to cool plot developments and interesting characters, but when it comes to your author business, all that thinking can hold you back.

When you know what action to take and you’re not taking it, you’re probably thinking about it too much. You may worry it won’t work out well, or you won’t be able to accomplish what you want to accomplish.

Realize thinking is the problem, gather your courage, and take action. Remember the instant you do something, your fear will dissipate. That’s just the way it works!

2. Realize failure can be a good thing.

One of the reasons it can be difficult to take action is because we fear failure, but this is simply because we haven’t failed enough.

Have you ever been super afraid of something for a large part of your life, and then one day realized it wasn’t anything to be afraid of? Failure is like that. Talk to any writer who has received a bad review, experienced poor sales, or fallen on her face during a book reading. She’ll tell you it wasn’t as bad as she feared, and that it actually helped her go on and tackle even scarier projects.

We have to experience failure to experience success. That’s because as human beings, we learn best through experience, not through thinking. Take action and fail, and you’ll be a lot further ahead than a writer who fails to take any action in the first place.

3. Get started, no matter what.

The hardest part of any endeavor is getting started. Writers are notorious for going through convoluted rituals (put all the dishes away, make a cup of peppermint tea, light a candle, feed the cat, walk around three times with your eyes closed, then finally sit down) just to get into the act of writing. It’s no wonder getting started on some other activity like planning a book launch can seem extra difficult.

The key is to make that first step as small as possible, because once you get started, it’s much easier to keep going. If you want to start a podcast, for example, maybe your first step is to simply write down some possibilities for the name of that podcast, or to write down five people you’d like to interview.

Make the first step easy, then do what you have to do to take it!

4. Change the words “I have” to “I want.”

When we want to make changes in our writing careers, usually those changes are difficult, or at least we perceive them to be, so we use words like, “I have to work on this project,” or “I have to make a list of people to review my new book.”

Simply changing the words you use can help send the message to your brain that this is important to you, which will boost your motivation. Try saying, “I want to work on this project for just 30 minutes before spending time with my family,” or “I want to add at least five names to my review list,” and see how it affects your attitude about taking action.

5. Tell someone else about it.

If you tell someone else about the project you’re working on, or the steps you plan to take, you suddenly force yourself to become accountable to that person. The next time you talk to him, he will likely ask you how you’re coming along (especially if you ask him to do so!), which will encourage you to take action even when you don’t feel like it.

We tend to value others’ opinions more than our own, and hate disappointing others or letting them down, so making yourself accountable to someone else can be really helpful. If you have writing friends, enlist them in your “taking action” goals and see if you can encourage each other to take consistent action this year.

6. Create a weekly success routine of taking action.

I started doing this a couple years ago, and I got addicted to it because a) it felt so awesome to actually see my ideas come to life, and b) because it worked so well to expand my writing career.

The idea is simple—just make it part of your weekly routine to take some sort of action toward the goals you’ve set this year. Actually write it down on your calendar—what days of the week you will take what actions—and keep that planning going for every week of the year.

This will not only help you form the habit of taking consistent action—which is the key to success—it will also help build momentum in your writing business, increasing your energy and feeding your motivation.

7. Make exceptions the exception.

Yes, life gets crazy, things happen, and there are always reasons not to take action. Sometimes, you’re not going to be able to follow through, but just how many times you allow yourself to make an exception will determine whether you eventually succeed.

“Hospitals are full of people who had great reasons for neglecting their health,” says Stephen Roe, creator of Thoughtful Growth. “And the world is filled with people cowering in regret because they had a great reason to give up on their dream—and now it’s too late.”

Take Action Today!

This year, I encourage you to become a consistent action-taker. Give it a try for just three months and then step back and examine the results. Start by taking some small action today toward your goals. Write a paragraph or outline about a new idea you have. Sign up for a class that will give you the skills you need. Make a list, call someone, or reach out to a mentor for help. Any small action will do, because once you cross the threshold from inaction to action, it will be much easier to keep going.

I love this quote from Asad Meah, CEO and founder of AwakentheGreatnessWithin.com. I hope it will inspire you to move past your fear and take action now:

“Lets just cut out the nonsense, you can read as many success books as you want, you can talk about your dreams as much as you want, you can dream up some great dreams, you can watch all the motivation videos you want, you can attend all the success seminars in the world, you can do all the online success courses, you can have the right beliefs, attitude, ambition, mindset, and mentality for success, but nothing will ever move you forward unless you take action. Action is the key. Action is what makes all the difference.”

Are you an action-taker, or do you want to be?

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Sources
Canfield, J. (2018, May 15). Get Motivated By Learning the Importance of Taking Action. Retrieved from https://www.jackcanfield.com/blog/how-to-take-action/

Meah, A. (2017, November 27). How To Be An Action Taker | AwakenTheGreatnessWithin. Retrieved from https://awakenthegreatnesswithin.com/how-to-be-an-action-taker/

Roe, S. (2017, August 24). 4 Hard Lessons You Must Learn to Become an Action Taker. Retrieved from https://www.thoughtfulgrowth.com/action-taker/