The Business of Writing: Principle #1: Desire

Hi, this is Steve with Life Writing Live. It has been an intense day. I've been working since I first got up this morning, getting ready to turn in, in terms of turning myself into a mushroom. I'm going to curl up with a good book, maybe watch some television. The weekend was intense. It was just work, work, work, work, work. Getting this TV pilot out, sent it off, and now it's in their hands. And what we can do is hope that it gets past the production company and they'll pass it on to the studio. But I've had this commitment to trying to share as much information as possible. And we did one. I've been doing them on art, a mixture of art and business. And I thought that what I would do maybe is separate the two. As long as I've got a backlog of about 50 different subjects, things I wanted to talk about, I thought that the best thing to do might be to see what happens if I talk about art in the morning and business at night. If you like these talks, then once again, please make sure to share them, because that's how we know that you're enjoying what we've got. I got an email, actually a Facebook message, from someone who'd written a mini series and was wondering, can I help them get produced? God, I would love to. I don't have an infrastructure for that, but what I can do is to try to give some advice about what works and what doesn't work. The traditional means of taking your work and getting it to the marketplace. Some of those things still work. They really do. But there are other things that are beginning to evolve, and that is people taking control of their own work. This happens when you're talking about novels. And it's also happening in terms of movies. The movie making technology has gotten simple enough, powerful enough that your iPhone can do better video than you had on professional video cameras a decade ago. So we created. We crowdfunded and created our own movie. And it was great. We had a wonderful experience with it. It taught us things. And we had to go out and market it and raise the money and produce it and edit it and then market it. We took control of that process and we learned things. So, people, if you have a book or a movie, something like this, the best thing you can do is both try the traditional routes to distribution and think about creating your own business. Because the artist has traditionally been one chunk of a larger machine, one cog of a larger machine. And I think that the people who are willing to take control, who are willing to think of themselves as a mini conglomerate, as a mini business who are doing artistic work as well as other things, as well as distributing and development and so forth, are going to be able to outperform the people who are just doing the creative work. Unless you really do have a powerful connection to the industry. So let's go over just a little bit the best source of information about how to build a business, how to make money as opposed to create art. I mean, they're two different things. And I think that maybe I want to try to set separate the two because even though they're connected, they can seem at such odds. They really, really can. The creation of the work and then the sale of the work. Such different things. I wish I could spend all my time just thinking about the fact that I love writing and I love writers and I love teaching. But if I don't pay attention to this other part, the little kid part of me that creates the work isn't safe and I can't tolerate that. So if you have to do that too, let's see what happens if I separate these things. And on days when I have enough creativity, enough Jews to do both of them, we will try to do that. The best book I've ever seen on the subject of success was the book Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill. Now Napoleon Hill himself was a very successful man, but he was nowhere near as successful as the people that he modeled. So he failed at a lot of business things. But you have to remember he also succeeded at being a best selling writer. He made a lot of money doing. So you can't look at everything about him. There are cautionary tales to look at him. But his study has been credited with more successful people than any single book I have ever heard of. Everybody focuses on that book. So let's take a look at what is good about it. And just one principle at a time. We'll try to do one principle every day. So the first principle is desire. You have to have a burning desire for what you're doing. Now this is not just true in making money in general. The inpod principle about building funnels. So you start with a burning desire for something and then you know, sales is a transfer of enthusiasm from one person to another. You know Sylvester Stallone writing Rocky, he took it around to more than 100 production companies, got rejected over and over and over again. Your stories will be rejected no matter what you do. People are going to stand in your way. And if you don't have some connection to your heart, that burning desire deep Inside you. You're going to get stopped halfway through in any project that you're doing, and you're going to be thinking, why am I bothering doing this? The Hero's Journey, which is another arc that talks about the process of movement from one position in your life to another, says that you're absolutely going to hit the dark night of the soul. You. There's no way around that. The thing that will get you through that dark night is, according to the hero's journey, faith. Faith is what gets you through, but what gets you on the road of trials. The thing that will get you moving is the desire to diminish the pain in your life or increase the pleasure you have to get going. We talk about, you know, we've broken down the process of writing to just one sentence a day. One sentence a day to do a book a year. If you don't have enough desire to do one sentence a day, then you need to look at the question of whether or not you really want to do this thing called being a writer. And whatever it is that you want to do, there are going to be minimum steps that you have to take in order to accomplish it. And you have to make contact with the part of you that says, yes, I will do this. This is who I am. And you have to know what it is that you want, and you have to know why it is that you want it, so that every single day, you are taking those minimum steps. Now, that's. That's the first thing. It's desire. And if you will ask yourself deep in your heart, who are you and who are you committed to being, and what is it that you can do in the world that will be an expression of that? Then all you have to do is find who are the people who need this thing that I have? And you will have an audience and you will be able to speak to them honestly. And whether that's an audience for a product or a service or a book or a movie or anything else, you're on your way. But start with desire. Do not, for God's sake, go into the arts thinking I'm going to make money. That is the wrong reason to go into the arts. It is possible to make money in the arts. I made a lot of money in the arts, but that is not what it was about. The money is about supporting the adult world, interacting with the adult world so that the little kid inside me can continue to play. Now, the. I always connect this from the passion part to the business practical part. If you want to learn more about the practical aspect of things here. You could check out the Life Writing Year long program@thejedijourney.com It's a great program. Or you could join our premium program@lifewritingpremium.com we're open again there for just a little while. So if you have questions, comments, requests, anything that has to do with art, the production of art and the sales of art, this is where we're going to be investigating. This is where we're going to be digging into it. I ask you to let me know if there's anything I can do for you. Let me know if you like these by sharing them. And aside from that, have a great evening. I can promise you that I'm going to watch 24 tonight. I'm going to chill, I'm going to hang out with my family. But I just wanted to talk to you again before I did. Take care. Have a good evening.