Lets Get Started Writing!

Hello, Steve Barnes here with another live writing live. Just trying to keep my word about doing this more often. I've made a commitment to doing it every day for just a few minutes. These are going to be short, but hopefully sweet. And they're leading into our podcast. Our Life Writing podcast will start this Sunday. And so if you go to www.lifewritingpodcast.com on Sunday, you'll see a brand spanking new episode that Tananarive and I are doing together. So we're going to be talking about writing and the writer's life and specifically how the tools of writing the life. Writing is specifically about how the tools of writing can be used not just to create a story or within a story, but to design your life. It's really amazing once you shift that perspective and I just want to give that to you because I've been blessed to be able to live my life doing this thing that I loved since childhood and to do it at a pretty high level. I mean, it's not the absolute highest of the highest of the highest, but New York Times best selling and Locust best selling and written for television and film and stuff like that. And even if I have not done all the things that I wanted to do and set out to do, I still find people asking me frequently, you know, Steve, how did you do this? How do you maintain your, your discipline? How do you do this? So we'll have these little short conversations talking about one little piece of this and then hopefully on the show on, on Sunday, we will be able to go more deeply. I think that we'll probably be recording the first of those on Saturday. So record them and then we'll post them and then you'll be able to get them. So I really want to know what you want to know. This is all about you. This is about giving back. It's about trying to communicate with people, all of whom could teach me things about the things that they know. And hopefully I can teach them some things about things that, that I know. So I wanted to talk about the six step process to getting published. Because one of the things that is sad, the saddest thing about success is that as you succeed, people will stop believing you're one of them. That people need to believe that there's something special about people who succeed. They were lucky or they were born with connections or they were born with unusual skills or this or this or this. And while some of that is true, you know the number of different ways that people have managed to succeed in life and things like writing are so wide that I've come to the conclusion that anyone with an average level of linguistic skill, average intelligence, could, with focus, make a living as a writer. You know, they'd have to be very focused. And clearly, if you're smarter and you got sort of seven league boots so that you can do things faster, it's easier for you. But I think that the concept of talent is not a useful concept, that the concept of talent suggests that either you have it or you don't. So what I would like to disabuse you of is any thought that I agree with, that I don't believe. I don't believe in talent. I believe in ability. I believe in developed skill, luck. If unusually bad luck will cripple anybody, unusually good luck will lift anyone up. But I think an average level of luck is all that's necessary to make it in a writing career. Everybody gets opportunities. If you're prepared for them, you. You then can grab onto them. Like I said, if you have unusually bad luck, that's not a good thing. I mean, it's like getting hit by a meteor, mess up your whole day. But you don't need to be, you don't need to be born into a literary family. You don't need to accidentally come across some editor who had this exact same experience you had and therefore is very open to what it is that you're saying. What you need to do is to follow certain principles every day, every week, every month, until you break through. And it might be useful for you to talk to some of your favorite writers or do some research and find out how long did it take them to get published. Because the hallucination is that these people just spring out full, born from the brow of Zeus. Whereas the truth is that most of them wrote and submitted and got rejected and wrote and submitted and got rejected and kept submitting those stories and kept writing stories until somehow they broke through. That's the typical pattern. How many stories does a typical person write? I'm going to guess. It's not a huge guess, but when I did research this, it looked to me like the average number was somewhere between 20 and 25 stories, sometimes between 20 and 30, let's say. And the number of rejections that they got, on average, they were rejected around 100 times, you know, about. About 100 rejections, sometimes more, sometimes less. But the, the trick is to collect your rejection slips, keep writing. So how do you do this? This is part of what we're going to be visiting over the next weeks, and so forth. So I said that these are going to be short, hopefully sweet. And the first thing, the first piece of the puzzle is you write at least one sentence every day. That's step one. Write at least one sentence every day. This helps you to break the psychological logjam as well as rids you of the excuses of, I don't have the time. And anybody who had the time to watch this has the time to write one sentence a day. So if you will start with that, writing at least one sentence a day. What I can promise you is that if you promise yourself that for 30 days, at the end of those 30 days, you will notice that promising yourself to write one sentence a day actually ends up writing a lot more than one sentence a day. Just because of a collection of psychological truths about human beings. That once you start overcoming the resistance, it gets easier. And if you're not thinking, oh, I have to write five pages to get something done, I don't have time to write five pages, so I'm not going to write anything. That pattern has destroyed more dreams. And you can find the exact same patterns in practicing martial arts or meditating. I don't have time to do what I define as the perfect amount, so I'm not going to do anything at all. What's the point of doing anything at all? The point is objects in motion remain in motion. Objects at rest remain at rest. So if you will get started, if you will just get started, it makes a fantastic difference. So we will be talking about these things, but that's the first step. Write at least one sentence a day. Write one sentence a day. Write one sentence a day. That is your homework. That is what will get you started. If you will just start with that. You know, what we said is you can write a book a year with a sentence a day as the minimum. If you say, I'm going to write a book a year with a sentence a day, you will simply find that after a few days, you don't want to write just one sentence. You're going to want to write more. But you've created the space, the time for it. You've got yourself started. So that's where we're going to begin. I'm going to be giving you everything we possibly can. I want you to come over to our podcast. You can find out more about the podcast@www.lifewritingpodcast.com. see you guys later. Take care. And right on, everybody.