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Writers, Give Yourself the Perfect Gift

What’s the perfect gift writers can give themselves? Simone Linke, my guest today, shares the secret. All yours, Simone.

So, you want to be a successful writer? And your wish list for Christmas this year includes lots of How To… guides, calendars with inspirational writing quotes, and fancy outlining software?

Well, forget about all of that! You only want one gift this year—and you don’t need anybody else to give it to you. Because this year, you will give yourself the perfect gift. You will give yourself the time to write.

Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if you can recite all those rules for how to write a bestselling novel. It doesn’t matter if you’re bursting with inspiration. And it doesn’t matter if you have mastered a dozen different software tools that claim to transform your raw ideas into suspenseful stories.

The only thing that does matter is the time you spend writing. As the saying goes: Good things don’t come to those who wait but to those who work their asses off. And no book or software tool will ever do that work for you. You will have to sit down and just do it yourself. And it will take time. A lot of time.

Therefore, stop making excuses and start making time.

One of the best ways to establish a writing routine is to build a writing chain, which basically just means you sit down every day and write. Individual goals may vary—you can aim for a certain number of words, or for a certain amount of time, or for a certain number of scenes per day no matter how many words and minutes they’ll take. And at the end of the day, if you’ve met your goal, you get to draw a beautiful and motivating “X” over that day in your writing chain calendar (you can download a very simple one from the Writers' Store).

At the time of writing this post, my personal writing chain already has more than 150 shiny links that I have steadily gathered ever since giving myself the time to write for my birthday in July. After months, heck, after years of procrastination, I knew I had to change something if I ever wanted to get to where I want to be.

Have I become a bestselling author or an Academy Award winning screenwriter since then? Of course not. It’s only been half a year. But I have written more than 80,000 words of prose, several outlines for new stories, and the scene structure for the screenplay I’m currently working on. More importantly, my brain has gotten used to this routine. It is now looking forward to those daily writing sessions and won’t let me fall asleep unless I have gotten some words onto the page.

This is exactly what you want to achieve. You want your brain to work for you, not against you. But just like any other muscle, your gray matter will protest initially. Your brain—or rather, that little devil inhabiting every writer’s brain—will tell you to take a day off. Just one more day to give your brilliant ideas time to mature. Just one more day of that oh-so-enticing procrastination. Just one more day. It won’t matter, right?

Wrong.

Every day that you are not writing is a day that you are not getting closer to your goal. Every day that ends with a blank page is a day that nurtures the little devil instead of the writer you are yearning to become. Every day without newly written words is a day you’ll regret at some point. Trust me on that one.

It is time for you to kick that little devil out of your brain and to take control of your writing career. Don’t wait for New Year’s Day or for some other randomly appropriate date. Start today. Start right now!

Set yourself realistic goals and then just pursue them. You have never written anything before? Then commit to writing individual scenes or flash fiction for a while. You have never written a whole novel? Then start by working on an outline and a treatment before you take the plunge. You feel bored or uninspired by what you have written so far? Then challenge yourself with a new genre or narrative style.

When I felt stuck with my screenplays, I decided to take a brief detour and try my hands on fanfiction. It felt a little odd at first because some of the fanfics out there are, well, a little out there. But I’ve also found quite a few truly talented authors, and as it turned out, it was a real challenge to work with existing TV characters and bring them to life in a completely different genre.

Besides, in screenwriting, it usually takes years before people will be able to read or watch your stories. The majority of scripts never get made at all. Thus, being able to get immediate feedback after uploading my stories to a fanfic website was exactly the kind of push I needed to help me resume work on my original screenplays. It may have been an unusual path, but it kept me writing every day and eventually helped me get back on track.

Thus, whichever writing path you choose to follow, the important thing is that you keep moving. Take baby steps or giant leaps, crawl on all fours or bounce around like Tigger. Just keep moving and writing!

If you do that, if you write every day, I promise you will see results very soon. Every new link to your writing chain will increase your word count, your skills, and your desire to write. And very soon, writing will have become such an integral part of your daily life that you won’t even have to reserve extra time for it.

So, what do you say? Are you ready to tackle the blank page and fill it with words? Then get yourself a writing chain calendar, wrap it and put a ribbon on top, and give yourself the perfect gift this year. You won’t regret it.

Merry Christmas!