Useful Resources : Advice for Writers : 10 Survival Tips

10 Survival Tips

Ten Tips for Psychological Survival in Writing

From Word Work: Surviving and Thriving as a Writer by Bruce Holland Rogers

1. When you’re having trouble getting a task started, atomize it. Don't sit down to write the Great American Novel. Sit down to write an okay first paragraph. If the prospect of sitting down and writing for four hours intimidates you, set a timer and write for fifteen minutes.
   
   
2. Go ahead and be a writer with flawed work habits. Make do. A short cut that works today is better than self-improvement that may bring results in the future.
   
   
3. Know what you want and why. Writers who stop writing often do so because they have begun to substitute someone else's motivations for their own. It's important to learn from teachers, peers, and experts on the business of writing. But it's even more important to remember what you love even if people you admire, respect, and learn from don't love the same things.
   
   
4. Unfinished work can become a drag on your psyche. The ideal for finished work is to make it highly polished and to get it into the mail. But if you must choose, take finished over polished. It's better to have your story done, imperfect, and in the mail than to have a highly polished and fragmentary manuscript in a file drawer.
   
   
5. Demand a lot of yourself. Writing is a discipline. You have to submit to the discipline and make some sacrifices if it is to shape your life in powerful ways. Only by being shaped by writing do you become a powerful writer.
   
   
6. Be gentle. Writing is a discipline, but that doesn't mean it's a punishment! Take yourself lightly. Have fun. Indulge and pamper yourself.
   
   
7. Writers divide themselves into opposing camps of the commercial versus the artistic, the professional versus the amateur. If we discount writers who have taken a different path, we lose our chance to learn from them. We're more similar than different. Give the respect you'd like to receive.
   
   
8. Don't go it alone. Sure, writing is a solitary pursuit. But what writers do is so different from what most people are doing that writers can easily start to feel like outsiders wherever they go. So find community, if not with other writers then with others who are involved in solitary creative pursuits - painters, bead makers, topiary gardeners.
   
   
9. Celebrate! When good things happen, share your happiness with others who will appreciate your achievement. At the very least, do something special for yourself, rather than setting your sights immediately on the next goal.
   
   
10. Remember: All advice is made up. Writing, like all of life, follows made-up rules. Some rules are useful. Some are outmoded or meant for someone else. If any advice doesn't feel right for you right now, ignore it.
    
    

Copyright 2003 by Bruce Holland Rogers. Reprinted with permission. Word Work is for sale at Amazon.

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