Hey everyone,
Earlier this month, I wrote and published a blog post titled What I Learned From Writing 1,000+ Stories For Over 300 Publications.
I got quite a few emails from writers telling me they loved the post, but more than that, they loved that I’d put it in numbers and that helped them to see how it can all add up over time.
A couple of people told me on LinkedIn that it had inspired them to go sit down and start writing immediately so that they could hit that number soon as well.
The truth of it, of course, is that numbers inspire me too, which is why I talk about them. Reaching that 30 queries goal at the end of the month or the 100 blog posts target at the end of the year can really motivate you to get off your ass when you’re not feeling quite so inclined. I’ve always done this, set numerical targets for the month and the year and then used them to motivate myself to really push beyond my comfort zone, even when I don’t want to.
I realized however, that I’m always so focused on looking forward that I sometimes forget to look back.
It wasn’t until I changed my name earlier this year that I realized that I’d had amassed over 1,000 bylines and that’s where that post came from. But following the success of that post I looked back at other parts of my writing life, too, and realized that in the 18 years since I came online and became a writer, I have written, run or created:
- 1,000+ stories for publications in 30+ countries
- 3,000+ blog posts/newsletters
- 100+ group coaching calls
- 19 programs for writers
- 10 nonfiction books (8 currently available, one retired, one waiting to be published)
- 2 novels (waiting to be published)
- 1 membership community (100+ members)
- 407 videos/audios for my paid writing communities
It is important for me to see this and I wanted to show it to you as well because when I first started my career, my biggest challenge was that I was a very slow writer. I was a new writer but I was also young (20) so I hadn’t yet found my voice, but more than that, I hadn’t yet built up the confidence to believe that anything I wrote mattered—even to me, let alone anyone else. So I struggled through every word.
Confidence comes with practice.
And it did. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote and I built up my clips, my credits, and my confidence, which in turn helped me build up more of those things.
The first 30 videos I recorded were terrible. I’m not being self-depracating. They were honestly terrible. My first few business ideas were terrible. My first few attempts at fiction were terrible.
Why wouldn’t they be?
It is the most natural thing to suck when you first begin. You’d be an anomaly if you didn’t.
Why we expect to write fully-formed things that are perfect the first time around, I still don’t know, but that’s the standard thinking in writing, is it not? You expect to sit down and fill that blank page with wonderful prose and when what you actually produce is shitty and unreadable, you question your talent and your worth as a writer. Instead of going through it sentence by sentence and trying to fix it, you throw it away. Instead of writing more so that you can get better, you think you’re just lacking in talent in this particular area.
The truth lies in the cliches about showing up, practice, and believing that your work today will be better than your work of five years ago and that your work five years from now will be better than your work of today, as long as you keep doing it.
It adds up. Show up consistently and over the years you don’t even realize just how much it’s added up. Until one day, you’re just running around, minding your own business, and you realize that you’ve written thousands of articles, essays, and blog posts, created hundreds of videos, and written almost a dozen books.
You realize that it happened because you learned not to dwell on any one failure, but also on any one success.
You wrote the second novel even after the first one didn’t sell.
You blogged every day for many years, even if it was just a sentence, even if it got zero comments.
You created a new e-course or program every quarter for several years, even when the first one did so well you had no need to create another program ever again.
You made 30 awful videos, and with that experience in your back pocket, you started to learn about lighting and make-up, and how to be entertaining on camera.
For writers and creative entrepreneurs of any kind, getting attached to one success or one failure can often be the biggest bottleneck.
We like to create, that is what fuels us, that is what makes us happy. The moment you stop creating, either because of success or failure, you will start feeling restless and unhappy and as though nothing in your career makes sense anymore.
So create. Do more of it, do it all day. Have a system for selling what you create but keep it incredibly simple so that you can focus on what truly matters to you.
(By the way, after years of trying to figure it out, look how simple my own system is now—I write and I talk to you about whatever’s on my mind that day, then I tell you about what I have going on in terms of paid programs. I create things I’m passionate about and I come here and tell you about them. Easy peasy.)
I create all day, every day, because that’s what I like to do. I write these emails, I write books, I write pitches that turn into paid assignments for magazines and newspapers, I create courses, I make videos, I make social media posts.
Over time it builds up and people say, look how prolific she is.
She is. Because she just keeps doing what she loves and as she succeeds, she does more of it, not less.
How about you?
Cheers,
Natasha