#057 - Are You an Unwriting Writer?

Hey, hit Splits Family. This is Shelly Hitz, the owner and founder of ChristianBookAcademy.com and my question for you today is, are you an unwriting writer? What I mean is, you love to write. You have a message burning on your heart. You know that God has called you to write, but you're not writing. It's so easy to push it to the back burner. Everything else gets a priority and, you know, we just say, I'll do it tomorrow, I'll do it tomorrow. And I've been there, too. If you are in this camp, I encourage you to start with a super small goal. What I typically recommend is start just saying, I'm going to sit down and write for 15 minutes. Whatever you can get done in that 15 minutes, call it good, and then move on. If you write for 50 minutes and you start to get in a flow and you have time and can keep writing, keep going, but just, just setting the bar low, you know, saying, I'm, I'm going to get at least 15 minutes. I'm just going to do 15 minutes. It tells your brain, like, I can do this. I can fit this in. And I, I also want you to consider a different goal. So some people will set a goal of 750 words. There's a website about that. I think it's 750words.com. And then like Julia Cameron, she recommends two handwritten pages for a book or three handwritten pages for a screenplay. And she calls it your daily quota. But I just recommend starting with something easy, like 15 minutes. That way, whether you're dictating into a phone or a computer, whether you're typing, whether you're handwriting, you. It's the same. You're just going to say, I'm going to do 15 minutes. And I was telling myself this recently because I have many book projects that I have just put to the. You know, I've. I've strategically procrastinated. You know, I've talked about that before on this podcast, but I've just put it, you know, aside while I've been focusing on other things and they've been coming up in my mind again. I'm like, no, no, no. I need to, you know, focus on this. It's so easy for me to go off on rabbit trails and to start other projects and not finish or, you know, really focus on what I'm currently doing. And so I keep telling myself, no, no, no, no, no. And when I was thinking about this recently, I'm like, I probably could do 15 minutes.

I pro.

Right now at this very moment led to do that. But we're in the full swing of getting ready for our next conference. It's going to be a one day conference. It's going to be so fun. So I'm really busy with that. But you know, there may come a time soon where I feel like, okay, it's time and I can do at least 15 minutes. Now I'm doing at least 15 minutes of writing every day. It's just not writing a book, it's marketing material, it's blogs, it's, you know, other things. But anyways, my encouragement for you today. Start small, lower the bar, set your goal smaller. And this week we have had our 15 minute writing challenge in Christian Book Academy. We do this every month and I love seeing people's comments. One of our members said he had been gone for a while and I and wants to get back into writing. And I said, hey, jump into our 15 minute writing challenge this week. Well, he posted today and he said, shelly, thank you so much for, you know, encouraging me to do this and reminding me about this. He said, I sat down to write and you know, he got some writing done and it was just so exciting to hear him, you know, getting moving again, getting unstuck. So if you're an unwriting writer, try it. Set your timer for 15 minutes and then let me know how it goes. You can post in our Christian Book Academy group if you are a member or email us supportrainingauthors.com Hope you have a great rest of your day. Bye. Bye.