Just Starting is a way around procrastinating, a way to make yourself write when you should. I mention “Just Start” a lot because it works. It is one of my most effective…tools. Hacks. Tactics. I’ve spoken about it here, here, and here, and more indirectly in many other posts on The Productive Indie Fiction Writer. […]
The Definitive “Just Start” Strategy To Get You Writing. Read More »
I had an interesting chat with an author the other day. They said, in part, “I’m not sure if I’m relieved or worried that an author as advanced as you still brings up the fact that she also has problems with this self-discipline thing.” This was in response to my post about self-discipline. I was
I am a perfect machine. My self-discipline is extraordinary. Read More »
We indie fiction writers are shafted by the nature of our business. Nearly everything we do takes forever. A novel can take weeks or months (or years!) to write. Building your back catalogue takes years. Marketing is a long term strategy that takes months or years to pay off. Once you’ve figured out what habits
A Powerful Tactic to Achieve Almost Anything Read More »
This is an old adage, but I wanted to circle back to it today, because it’s the beginning of the year, and we’re getting close to the point where most New Year’s Resolutions drop off a cliff. (Generally, that’s somewhere in February.) White knuckling your way through writing sessions, just hanging in there until you
Learn to Love Writing, Not “Having Written” Read More »
I’ve had a long-running, on-again-off-again affair with self-discipline. I admire the iron discipline of dancers, and would love to have that sort of discipline myself. I’ve been working on it all my life. “Success” methodologies have been around since Victorian times, but my first introduction to the idea of creating one’s own success was in
Let’s Pull Self-Discipline Off the Garbage Heap Read More »
One of my terrible tendencies is that I’m a relapsing/remitting Perfectionist. So, writing about planning for the new year, in the New Year, instead of December 2023, makes me itchy and uncomfortable. Because planning now, my perfectionist brain argues, ruins the year. The year has already started, and now it’s already a mess because the
How to Review Your Business & Plan for This Year Read More »
Last week, I talked about batching: breaking up complex tasks into their component steps, then doing just one step multiple times at once. When all the steps are batched like this, the work on each step goes much faster than if you do all the steps in a complex task one after another, switching your
Chunking: Another way of saving time. Read More »
One of my very first jobs, after I left high school, was data entry. Thirty of us would punch in numbers from thousands of sheets of engineering reports that had been collected for a month, from across the state. Granted, these days, those same engineers would be punching in their own data on a mobile
A Henry Ford Efficiency You Can Use to Save Time Read More »
Did you enter NaNoWriMo this year? Did you win? Congratulations! What is NaNoWriMo? If you haven’t heard of this annual competition before, let me explain quickly; Every November, writers can set themselves the challenge of writing a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of the month. NaNoWriMo = National Novel Writing Month. The novel
What to Do with Your Story Now NaNoWriMo is Done Read More »
Indie writing is a peculiar profession. We want to write more – always – but the roadblocks and self-sabotage we put ourselves through is unique. General productivity sites don’t address our unique issues. You must find sites like the excellent Prolifiko, run by Chris Smith and Bec Evans, to find productivity advice specific to writers.
The Top 8 Productivity Sites That Help Writers Write More in Surprising Ways Read More »
