Lifewriting #4: Polish and submit your work

Hello. Oh, my God. It's been busy today. I don't know how long this is going to be. I'm, you know, talking about doing no more than five to seven minutes on these so that I can actually fit them into my schedule. I was following the six step life writing process, but today what I had to do was to spend a couple of hours doing a podcast for the Daily Show. And then after that, I had a chance to get together with a very, very good friend, wonderful friend, Brian Fuller, who is reading a script of mine and giving feedback. It's necessary, just work, work, work, work, work. And all this is trying to get ready for the life writing podcast that we're going to do tomorrow. It's going to drop on Sunday. And if you go to www.lifewritingpodcast.com, you'll be able to get notifications and so forth and find out how to get that. So what's important is that you get clear enough on what your, your result is, that you can then work backwards from that to what, what steps do I need to achieve that result? But before you go there, you really need to have the why, why do I want to do this? So if I'm looking at all these things, you know, why do I want the podcast? Well, I want to be able to teach and I want to be able to use it for marketing. Just being honest. And, you know, why did I do the podcast for the Daily show today? Well, first of all, they were asking about a subject that I care about, Black horror and the history of horror and so forth as it relates to the diaspora. But also because if I do that properly, their podcast has 100,000 downloads at the least. So that means that by promoting my podcast on their podcast, some of those people are going to come over to mine. So my idea is I want 20,000 downloads. If I can get 20,000 downloads, I can accomplish what it is that I'm looking for career wise in terms of the business, which is to make enough money off of the business to replace my Hollywood and book, book writing income so that I can write nothing but for fun, you know, that's the goal, is to be able to write in Hollywood just for the fun of it, for the sheer love of it, then the little kid inside me is gonna feel free to play and I will do my best writing ever. So, you know, this is all tactical and strategic. It really, really is. It's helping people, it's helping myself, it's having fun, it's playing, it's building a business that you know, friends can work in, and my son will be able to work in. These are all things that I care about. They're all important to me. So today, you know, got that out of the way. Two minutes and 45 seconds in. And by the way, hi, everybody. And so glad, glad to see you. I'm glad that, that we're able to connect with each other more. If you have any questions that you'd like me to answer by the end of this, please post them. I will try to get to those. So we've gone over the six. We're going over the six steps for writing. And the first step is to write at least a sentence a day. Step two is to write one to four short stories a month. Step three is to polish and submit them. And step four is to don't rewrite except to editorial request. In other words, once you send a story out, go on to the next story. Don't keep rewriting that story endlessly. Writer's block is anything that stops you from writing, finishing what you write, polishing it, putting it in the mail, selling it. One of the things that will stop you from doing that is feeling like you have to endlessly polish a story rather than just going on to the next. You're going to learn far more by going on to the next story than you will by polishing one story endlessly. Stories will never be perfect. No matter how long you work with them. You're always going to see something else that could be done differently. That's just the nature of consciousness. It's not a problem. It's not a flaw in your work. It's not a flaw in your mind or your emotions. The only problem is nobody ever told you that. So let's piggyback this on another discussion, which is, you know, the voice is in your head, okay? You are not the voices in your head. You are the one listening to the voice. And when you separate those two things out, hopefully a light bulb will go off in your head. You will understand why you have been the way you are throughout your life. It's just one of those things. So the things that I teach about the physical, you know, the things I teach about the psychological and the spiritual, the personal relationships, all this stuff, Internets, it's all interconnected, which is one of the reasons why I enjoy. I don't reject artists who insult me, you know, who can have attitudes, political attitudes, I don't disagree, I don't approve of, because I see that all human beings are flawed. And sometimes my disagreements with them are not flaws, they're differences of opinion. And I'm fascinated by what process people go through to create. I'm fascinated by it. How do they do what they do? And so when I hear that a creative person has been found as being very, very flawed in this way or that way, you know, it doesn't change what I thought about their work up until that point. I actually go in and I ask myself the question, if we now know this about them, did it show in their work? Was there something in their work that I could have seen? How did it come out? Because understanding how flawed people use their fears, their insufficiencies, their powerful emotions, even if those emotions are sometimes twisted and tangled, to create things of beauty. That fascinates me because we all have multitudes within us and we need to be able to make our peace with our multitudes. These people are people who could not make their peace with their internal world in a healthy way. I give thanks that I have been, but it was not preordained. I could easily have gone down the wrong path in any number of different ways. And I give thanks every day that life has been kinder to me than that. The idea that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God and so forth, and those without only let those without sin throw the first stone. Those are Christian expressions of that. But I think that there are expressions of that in every religion and philosophies. It's just none of us are perfect here. We have to get along with each other despite that. And I think that if you hang around on Facebook any period of time, you can see how difficult it is to get five people to agree on anything. So asking why it is that our political leaders have a hard time leading the country should be a no brainer. It's because of us. It's because of the nature of what we are as human beings. We're not stupid. We just see the world differently from each other. And. And in trying to communicate and trying to build a coalition, trying to build a relationship, we end up shaping ourselves or fighting with each other. It's difficult when you're trying to write, you're trying to communicate, you're trying to find something within yourself that somebody else will appreciate enough to give you money for it, Buying a book or going to see your movie so we can talk about the processes that lead to being able to create product, but then we have to talk about the processes within us that allow us to take our emotions and to interpret them through our craft to create things that create emotional change on the other side when the other person gets it. So that's what we're doing with life writing. LifeWritingPodcast.com we're going to start this Sunday. I'm probably going to record the first one tomorrow, but it'll go up on Sunday. So like I said, that's it for today. These are going to be short and sweet. I hope that this is a benefit to you. I hope you're enjoying this as much as I am, and I will see you on Monday.