Most writers and infopreneurs think of talking as a form of procrastination, something that actually prevents you from sitting down and writing and working.

In one way, this can be true. However, the right sort of talk can actually encourage persistence and build on your creativity in your writing.

If you are looking for motivation to overcome obstacles, or encouragement to keep going, there is nothing better than talking with like-minded individuals.

Joining a writing group, or online forum discussion can be extremely helpful. Whenever you are struggling to write, jump online or arrange to meet someone from your writing group. Sharing what you are feeling and the difficulties can help you to regain perspective about writing.

Like any trade, writing has its ups and downs. It can be difficult to pick yourself from a down when you work by yourself. Human interaction is the key to finding yourself and your motivation when things get tough. Finding like-minded individuals who have similar struggles can help you get through the tough times and regain your focus and concentration.

I’ve had writer friends suggest article ideas when I’ve had a mental blank, or suggest websites that provide mental stimulation that encourage creativity again.

I’ve also had writer friends ask for advice and have enjoyed the benefits of experienced writers who share their own experiences of getting through the depression and frustrations which can be as much of the lot of writers, as can the joys of achievement.

Indulge in a short break from looking at the blank computer screen to send an email to a friend or chat in a writer’s forum, and you will frequently find that you are better equipped to persist through the tough times.

Writers must generally write alone for the best creativity, but that doesn’t mean we have to battle through the hard times alone.

Understanding yourself and how your mind thinks can also help you to persist in hard times. Many sociologists have completed studies on the impact of self-talk and mind chatter. Basically, the general theory is that we believe, enact on, and propagate the same information we send our brains.

If the mind chatter is negative, you will generally struggle and find everything hard. If your self talk is positive, you will generally find the tasks easier. Sometimes it can be as simple as changing the refrain from “I’m having a bad day” to “I can do this”. Think of the children’s story of the Little Red Engine (“I think I can”, “I know I can”, etc).

If you find you are having a difficult day in writing, give yourself a short mental break. You may find exercising beneficial too, as it releases endorphins and the ‘feel good’ hormones.

Come back to your computer refreshed and reinforce every positive message to yourself you can. Break the cycle of negative mind chatter and you will definitely succeed.

The other thing you can do to encourage yourself to be persistent in your writing is to give yourself incentives to work hard on your writing or creativity. Give yourself a mini-challenge of completing a particular task within an hour, and give yourself a small treat as a reward when the task is complete. Share your joys with your writing friends, as well as your struggles, as this will encourage others within your group on tough days too.

Start the right sort of talking to help yourself break free from the doldrums and come into the light of creativity in your writing. You can do this!

My next post is the start of the I in HABITS. Make sure you don’t miss it…

In a way, the very meaning of being persistent is to strive to overcome difficulties, so this post is really debating a moot point.

However, the reality is that when obstacles arise, or when you find it difficult to concentrate, or are lacking your creative muse, it can be very difficult to continue writing.

Here are five things I like to do to encourage and motivate myself to persist during the hard times whether it’s as a writer, creative consultant or infopreneur.

1 – Believe in what you are doing

When it gets hard as a creative writer, like when you haven’t made a sale for a while, or you have a mental block and can’t figure out what to write, or you have suffered a rejection from a publisher, you need to go back to basics and remind yourself why you are writing in the first place. You undertook the work because you believed in yourself, and that hasn’t really changed deep down.

2 – Prioritise your work

I find this an easy way to overcome the mental blocks and encourage myself to continue to persist with my writing. Whenever I get stuck, I make a list of the tasks I want to achieve within a certain time frame. Then I select the most important task to do next. Listing out the jobs on my whiteboard helps too. Often I’ll even put down a time next to each task, and give myself a mini-challenge to complete the task in the allotted time. This helps me to focus and persist with my writing.

3 – Identify the roadblock

If you can identify what the problem is, and why you are having difficulty in pursuing your creative writing, you are one step closer to overcoming the obstacle in your path. One day I found I just couldn’t focus, and after a few minutes of wondering why, I realized I was just very hot and the room was stuffy. I turned on a fan, went and had a cold drink from the kitchen and when I returned to the computer, I found my writing muse again.  Identify whatever is really blocking your road and then work out how to remove the roadblock to your creativity.

4 – Identify what you do NOT need to do

Sometimes as a writer you can have so many different projects or tasks to complete. Having different deadline days for different clients helps me to prioritize what I have to do when, and more importantly, what I do not have to complete that day. This is part of time management and prioritizing, only working on the essential work first.

5 – Forget perfection paralysis

One of the common obstacles writers will face is what I like to call “perfection paralysis”. Sometimes you can spend hours trying to research a particular point, or an hour trying to perfect one single sentence. Instead of spending so long on one point when you are stuck, move on to the next item or task to complete. Come back to it later when your mind is fresh and you can be creative again.

Don’t try to write the perfect article or story first time around. Every writer needs to rework a first draft, before sending it to the client. If you get stuck on a particular sentence or paragraph it often helps if you write the next one anyway. Then you can come back and rephrase the sentence that was troubling you, once you have got back into the flow of writing again.

Being persistent in your creative writing will certainly pay dividends. It is worth struggling through the hard times to make your achievements even sweeter in the end.

B = Be Persistent

Putting the ‘B’ in HABITS in the CREATIVE HABITS series.

If you have had an article, novel, short story, or book rejected by a publisher, don’t worry you are in very good company. Legendary authors like J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, Clive Cussler, Dean Koontz, George Orwell, Enid Blyton and Sylvia Plath all have had work rejected by publishers before going on to become world famous serial best selling authors.

The key to becoming successful as an author and infopreneur is learning how to be persistent.

Creative writers need to be persistent in so many ways.

You need to be persistent in actually doing the hard work of writing. You need to be persistent in crafting your words, and editing or proofreading your own work to improve and reduce errors.

You need to be persistent in aiming for publication of your work when it is completed, and that includes picking yourself up after a rejection letter, and starting the process again. You need to be persistent in believing in yourself, your craft, and your ideas, or you will take every rejection letter to heart.

The payoffs of persistency are high.

If every author stopped writing after the first rejection received, there would be no books in the world. Believing in yourself, and knowing you can write well, will help you to remain encouraged, even in the face of a rejection. The trait of persistency will help you to overcome these obstacles and taste the sweeter nectar of success in the end.

Writers who patiently work at perfecting their craft will enjoy greater success than those who settle for writing mediocrity.

You can dream big, and succeed, if you have the trait of persistency that won’t let you give up when things get tough. Writing is a craft that can be continually developed, as you learn new techniques, words, and tricks of the trade to use in your work. The harder you work at perfecting your skills as a writer, by reviewing and editing your own writing, the more you can drink from the cup of success.

If you give up easily after a rejection, or even constructive criticism, you will not learn from the experience. There is great joy in improving your work, and paying attention to constructive criticism can help you to achieve this. Persistence in striving for continuous improvement will pay off.

Being persistent can actually help you to achieve more writing.

If you want regular clients or customers who will finance your  writing work, you will need to persistently achieve results for them. This means producing the work in the format, time, and word length requested or wanted by them. You need to be persistent in putting in the hard yards to meet your deadlines, if you want to retain your paying clients.

This means that you also need to persistently make a commitment to your writing, and dedicate enough time to practice your art. As you steadily work away at perfecting your craft, you will find the proofreading and editing gets much easier, as the first draft will be closer to the desired final product than when you first started writing. You will also find yourself writing faster, and generating more creative ideas to write about, with practice and persistency.

The payoffs of developing the quality of persistency are high.

It will mean you won’t become dejected if a rejection slip comes your way, you will work faster, and more efficiently, and you will enjoy the crafting of your words. Doggedly working at becoming a successful creative writer is not always easy, but it is worth it in the end.

photo credit: Ashnikov

Writing is a skill, and a creative art. Often people are attracted to writing as a career, because it satisfies the something deep in their soul called creativity.

There’s nothing quite like the feeling of accomplishment when reading your writing and seeing the impact your writing has made on another human being. It doesn’t have to be the next literary prizewinner. It could be a great landing or sales page that brings in lots of customers, a fabulous blog post, or a poem or heartfelt words on a loved one’s birthday card.

And like all creative arts, writing doesn’t just happen. We still need to work actively at our craft.

The writers’ rule should always be activity rather than passivity.

Passive people are those who simply wait for the creative genius to light up their mind and are quite content to write only when they feel in the mood for it. However, active people will still work at their writing craft, even if the light of genius is not presently burning.

Active Voice In Writing

Good writers know that writing in active voice is easier to read, concise, and less subject to misunderstanding. Using active voice is the best technique we have to make our writing concise. It ensures the action is clear and focuses on the person completing the action.

In the same way, we should in ourselves be active, and work consistently to complete the action of writing.

Activity In Writing

Being active in your writing is more about actually writing, rather than spending time in non-productive ways. It is too easy for writers to say that the genius light is not burning today and then accomplish nothing. Even when you are having a bad day, you can still write.

Taking action includes having time to write, using that time productively, and ensuring that methods of procrastination do not take over the writing time. Good writers will also be active in their daily habits.

Obviously, you will tend to be more creative when you are feeling fresh and energetic. However, use the times when you are less energetic to still actively achieve your writing work. Creativity is not the only requirement for a good writer; hard work is a necessity for success.

Ways to Get More Active

Here are some ways writers can become more active rather than passive in their writing:

Set Goals, Tasks and Deadlines

• Giving yourself some goals and tasks to complete each working day will help you to keep focused.  When you work to a deadline you find that you are most productive in the final few hours of the time, rather than in the first. This is because the deadline itself acts as a motivator.

• If you are working on a long project, the deadline can seem too far away, and you can convince yourself you have time to procrastinate. However, if you break up the project into smaller tasks and give yourself daily or even hourly deadlines with specific tasks to achieve, you can be more productive in your writing every day.

Be Disciplined

• Have a routine and stick to it as much as possible.  Get up at the same time each day, and start your writing at the same time. Give yourself regular breaks but be disciplined. Creative writing does not just magically happen, much as though we wish it would.

• Disciplined writers will make themselves sit down and start writing, even if they are not in the mood. Disciplined writers will work to practice and improve their art, even when no deadline is looming.

Make a Start

• This is one of the most important things you can do to get active in your writing. Do not spend time going around in circles staring at a blank computer screen.
• WRITE! Write anything. Give yourself a draft outline of what you are going to write, with a key phrase or word for each paragraph. Then fill in each paragraph.
• You may find that starting in the middle is easier than writing an introduction. You can always come back to a particular paragraph that is proving difficult later on. Make a start and you will often find that the creative genius lights up and the words will start to flow.

Be active in your writing and TAKE ACTION! Make a start, keep going and be disciplined about your writing and your precious time.

This is the last in the A=Action habit (for the time being) in the CREATIVE HABITS series. I hope it’s given you some things to think about and action..

In New South Wales (NSW) Australia, we’ve had a long running road safety campaign called Stop, Revive, Survive. The campaign urges drivers who have a long journey ahead of them to stop every 2 hours for a short break – whether it’s to have a coffee and something to eat or to walk about and stretch their legs.

The point of the campaign is to reduce the number of deaths on the road, particularly during major holiday periods when just about everyone packs up and jumps in the car to go somewhere.

Research has shown a long journey is very fatiguing, particularly so for the driver as they require high concentration levels. It has also shown that about two hours concentration is all we can take before the possibility of mistakes creep in.

What has this go to do with creative infopreneurs? A lot, I believe.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m in the ‘drivers seat’ in front of my computer I’m very eager to get to my destination – whether it’s writing, research or general catch up. So much so that when I start to feel a bit stiff in shoulders from all that hunching over or my mouse arm aches, I ignore it.

I say to myself, ‘just a few minutes more, then I’ll stop for a break’ – but I don’t. And when I finally do stop, it takes me quite a while to iron out the kinks in my neck and back enough to get out of the chair!

Maybe it’s me, I don’t know. But what I do know, the longer I sit in the ‘drivers seat’ the more fatigued both my mind and body become. And that’s not good as it takes a toll on the quality of my work, and I take pride in what I do. Even more so if I’m being paid for it!

I believe we owe it to ourselves to get into the habit of every couple of hours to stop what we are doing, get up and move around. Take advantage of this time to chill out, have something to eat, reflect on what you’ve been doing, do some exercise. It doesn’t matter what. But of one thing I’m sure, when you go back to what you were doing, you’ll feel refreshed and motivated and a lot more productive. I know I do.

Give it a try and and you’ll soon reap the benefits.

Stop, Revive, Survive.

Here’s some facts about time. There are:

• 60 seconds in every minute,
• 60 minutes in each hour,
• 24 hours in a day, and
• 7 days in a week.

It’s the same for all of us. The difference for each of us is how we use this time.

As infopreneurs and solopreneurs, time is a precious thing. We are very aware of it as we work towards our deadlines.

So let me ask. Do you control and use it as a friend? Or does it control you so it’s become your foe?

Friend or foe. Which is it for you.

And if you answered friend, that’s fantastic. We’d love to know your secret, so don’t keep it to yourself and let us all know you’re secret to managing time.

But I digress…… No matter if time is your friend or foe, we all need to take a ‘time-out‘. Just like in a basketball game where the coach calls a time-out so he can gather the players together and discuss and revise tactics, you need to do the same.

Why, because you need to go to the sideline and take a total game view. When you’re busy playing in the game, you have a different perspective of how it’s playing out. You’re focused on your next move. The coach on the sideline is focused on the big picture and what the team needs to do to win.

So take a leaf out of the coach’s book and call a time-out for yourself. Give yourself time to review your play and tweak and adjust as necessary and then get back in the game. Being able to take time-out and prepare for different possibilities makes it much easier to cope with anything thrown in your way. Just like in a basketball game.

Here are three suggestions on how you can put your time-outs to good use.

Review your game plan

Sit down with your goals and objectives and ask yourself questions such as:

• Am I you on the right track to achieving them?
• Do I need to change my play strategy?
• Do I need change what I do, my tasks?
• Are they still realistic?
• Are they still needed?

Review your timeframes

Once you’ve looked at your game plan, think about the timeframes you’ve put down to achieve them.

Are they too ambitious? Are they too easy? Either can be demotivating, making it difficult to achieve your goals.

Remember timeframes are only estimates you’ve given yourself. Make sure you build in time for the flow of day to day life and interruptions.

Getting from the back court to the basket isn’t always a straight line, you need to allow for the occasional zigzag or backwards step. And that’s OK, because you know you will ultimately be heading forward to that basket and scoring.

Know your workstyle rhythm

By knowing when and how you like to work, you are much more productive and effective. I talked about this in Rhythm of Creativity so I won’t repeat myself.

Once you find and understand your rhythm you will be amazed at how much you can get done. Use your time-out to reflect on your creative rhythm and how you can continue to make it work for you.

Final thoughts

Be kind to yourself and use the refreshing power of a time-out regularly. This way you’ll make time your friend, not your foe. I know you’ll find it very empowering!