Reasons to Write: Write to Heal

By Christina Katz

Are you in pain? Are you confused about what you want in life? Or, even if you know what you want, are you unable to express it? If you answer yes to any or all of these questions, then you might want to consider writing to heal before you begin writing for publication.
 
When you write with the intention to heal, amazing growth can occur that creates a ripple effect of good in your life. Writing to heal will clear the way for the writing to get published down the road. Think of it as a kind of spring cleaning, clearing of the decks, preparing of the soil, or any other words that help you remember how writing to heal can lay the foundation that you can then build a solid writing career upon.
 
And if you are already in the midst of your writing career and find yourself standing on shaky or uncomfortable ground, writing to heal can help restore balance and a feeling of wholeness. When the stakes are high and you’ve got a lot on your plate, it’s not a bad idea to restore a little faith in yourself. That’s exactly what writing to heal does.
 
I am no stranger to writing to heal. I spent several years after I completed my coursework at Columbia College Chicago just writing to repair my own cracked foundation. Then several years later, I switched gears and began writing for publication. Naturally, the latter went a lot better than it would have had I not spent years focused on filling notebooks with every thought, complaint, fear and worry.
 
Have I been perfectly neurosis-free ever since? Of course not. But those years of self-inquiry freed me from the perfectionism prison that I had, unwittingly, been living inside. They loosened the chokehold that my perceptions of other people had on me. And they allowed me to just be myself in a more authentic and integrated way.
 
Of course, none of these changes happened quickly. They all occurred gradually and continue to unfold even when I don’t devote the lion’s share of my energy to writing to heal. That’s because the payoff of writing to heal has long-term benefits. There were things I learned during those years that I will never forget.
 
I don’t believe that there is any perfect opportunity for writing to heal; you just have to make time for it the best you can. But I do believe that if you need to heal but avoid it, your unhappiness will create roadblocks to your success. So don’t be ashamed if you feel like perhaps you need to put writing for publication aside, and focus your energy on writing to heal instead.
 
If you are unsure, just ask yourself a couple of questions like those I began this piece with. Do you know what kind of prisons you are living inside? Do you know how to write your way out? If not, I recommend devoting time and energy to the process on a regular basis if you feel that writing to heal might benefit you. Best of luck on your writing-to-heal journey! Here are some books that can help you get started:
 
The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
 
Writing Down the Bones by Nathalie Goldberg
 
Bird By Bird by Anne Lamott
 
How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything by Cheri Huber
 
Your Heart’s Desire by Sonia Choquette
 
Simple Abundance by Sarah Ban Breathnach

 

 

Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country. Her new website is located at christinakatz.com.

Reasons to Write: Write to Express Yourself

By Christina Katz

We have arrived at my number one reason to write: to express myself. But before I can communicate well with anyone else, first I need to communicate with myself.
 
Sounds easy, right? But anyone who writes will tell you that there is a lot more to self-expression than meets the mouth.
 
I remember once upon a time when I was in my twenties and getting an astrological reading. The astrologer, whose name was Mary, finally said to me about three quarters of the way through our conversation, “You need to speak up, Ms. Virgo Moon. Speak up!”
 
I was slightly startled and I sat there blinking for a moment. Mary had been pretty sensitive to my twenty-something angst up until that point, but about “speaking up” she seemed to have struck a key point.
 
The only problem was that I had no idea, if I ever did decide to speak up, what I’d say. How can I communicate well with you, if I don’t know what I think, feel, or sense?
 
My thoughts in my twenties were a swirl of self-consciousness, neediness, and voracious appetites. The same can still go for today if I’m not centered when I express myself. If that happens what you are likely to hear mostly are complaints, concerns, and whatever else happens to be chafing my mind at the moment.
 
On the other hand, if I’ve spent some time writing before we talk, I can get a load of chatter off of my head and settle into my deeper mind, I can tell you about the things that matter most. Share revelations. Maybe even experience an epiphany and capture it like a lightning bug.
 
What I’ve learned over the years of slow self-revelation is that when it comes to self-expression, the key isn’t to censor what you think. The key is to be able to tell the difference between someone you can say anything to and someone with whom you should probably stick to polite conversation.
 
Have you ever noticed that there are an awful lot of people in the world who wish to only speak about superficial things? Don’t try to share your deep mind with these folks because you will likely just make them uncomfortable. Find some deeper minds that compliment yours. Tell them what you really think because on the other side of what you really think is the truth. Not just any truth but yours.
 
Remember the movie, “Say Anything”? Remember how Lloyd Dobbler said he was looking for a “dare to be great situation”? Here’s who you can say anything to: people who love you, best friends, and pieces of paper. If you want to find your dare to be great situation, explore these possibilities first. And then you will find out what you think followed swiftly by what you want to say. That’s how you get beyond polite conversation to the material that really matters.
 
Express means to say, to show meaning, to reveal your thoughts. If your thoughts come tumbling out like circus clowns, then so be it. But find the tribe of folks who will allow this to happen if you want to get to your deep mind.

When was the last time you were with someone who would allow your thoughts to just come tumbling out? Stick with those people. Listen to them too. Sharing the stuff found in your deep mind with another person is probably the most important gift in the world…and the rarest.
 
 
Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons to Write: Write to Relax

By Christina Katz

Do you feel calmer and more centered after writing? I know I do. Maybe I’m just a wound up ball of nervous energy and the only way I can loosen up is by channeling that creative urge into a discipline like writing. Maybe I can’t really loosen up unless I have a pencil in hand or a keyboard at my fingertips. Maybe I am just too intense!
 
Although, to cut myself a little bit of slack, when writing is what you do every day, it’s easy to forget that you ever wrote to relax. The typical cause of this type of amnesia is usually deadline pressure and other professional obligations, which interferes with the playful joy of just splashing around in the creative process without a worry in the world- typically the kind of experience that brought many of us to writing in the first place.
 
I am certainly not exempt. When the deadlines are running high, I sometimes forget that writing and relaxing go together like lolling in a hammock goes with summer. Yesterday, after a couple of days of feeling out of sorts, I sat down and cranked out an article that was almost due.
 
Afterwards, I remarked to my husband what a great mood I was in…and then I noticed why. I was in a great mood because I had just finished a period of concentrated writing. It did not matter that this was an assignment that I have every month. It did not matter that the material I was writing has already been well traversed by my pen. I completely enjoyed composing the article and polishing it for publication.
 
Yet it was only because I forgot how much I like to write that I enjoyed it so much. Like most things, the harder you try to keep the feelings the same as they once were, the more elusive the pleasurable ones become. Actually, the more you insist on things staying exactly the same, the less you can really grow as a writer.
 
So if the process of writing isn’t as relaxing as it once was, you might want to reunite with a long-lost friend, that antique among writing devices, the pencil.  And since we’re talking about pencils, we can’t go much further without also bringing up the pencil’s best friend, a good electronic pencil sharpener.
 
I am writing this column on a yellow legal pad with a newly sharpened pencil, while sitting on the floor of my carpeted office, with my back against the floral-pattern couch, listening to the whisper of graphite on paper. The rhythmic movement of my hand across the page making a sharp point dull soothes whatever savage beasts I might have been wrestling with only moments ago.
 
In fact, if you were to bring up one of the beasts by name in this moment, I would shrug it off: Beasts, what beasts? Shhh. I’m writing. By the time my pencil is made dull, I’ll forget that I ever had a negative thought, a neurotic impulse, or a bad habit. None of them will have mattered one whit. I will be as close to at peace as a ball of nervous energy can come.
 
You might be tempted to try and bottle that feeling of blissful release. To try and replicate it every time you sit down to write. But don’t. You can get hooked on your own compulsive urges. They can wreck things that otherwise work beautifully. Don’t. Just forget the results you hope for and feel the whirl of the motor as you sharpen up that pencil.

 Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons to Write: Write to Grow

By Christina Katz Another of the many reasons I write is to grow. I recently doodled a picture of my writing career and it came out looking like a garden. Each row of plants represents something I do: writing, publishing, speaking, teaching, hosting, mentoring, etc. The money invested in my education both in the past and my continuing, ongoing education enrich the soil and allow for a steady stream of crops coming up season after season. I love that feeling of putting good stuff in and getting good stuff out. Of composting the old writing to see what new something can grow out of the steaming, decomposing muck. The realization that what remains can be reused to enrich the next crop. That nothing goes to waste. Given the economy, and the massive switch over to a “gig” economy from a more long-term career focus, some days I can’t believe how lucky I am to have started my garden over a decade ago, so that I’m not rushing and trying to catch up with the times. I remember my early days as a writer though. There were just a few shoots coming up in my garden. I remember the feeling that I did not have enough gigs cropping up and the frustration of not being exactly sure what to do to get more. I stayed with it though. I found mentors. I read books. I attended workshops. I went to writer’s conferences. I interviewed successful people I admired. And I expanded my skills beyond just writing. We are living in changing times. The real farmers who have actual farms and acreage and seeds and the hope of future crops are in trouble. And just because I have created my own farm so to speak, which doesn’t require any actual soil, seeds, or crops, doesn’t mean I should turn my back on the real thing-the real world, I mean. The Internet is swell. It has allowed me to have the career I’ve always wanted. However, I find myself needing to remember that I don’t live in the virtual world my 2.0 career thrives on. Rather, I live in the real world with real people and real pains and joys and middle places. The Jungian psychologist Marian Woodman speaks often in her work about the shadow side of things. Every person has a shadow side. Deny the humanity of a person long enough and the shadow side will take over. The shadow side is unfeeling, numb, and insatiable, unlike the alive, intuitive, balanced self who can experience the full spectrum of emotions, connect and know beyond circumstance. The saving grace for me, as a person who thrives in the Internet Age, is that I found my legs as a writer first. Writing has always helped me discover my feelings, communicate with others, and stretch as a human being. Writing has always been a way to grow. I am convinced that without writing my spirit would have been thwarted, stuck, and confined to that horrible feeling of darkness-my shadow. The shadow is a cold, dark and miserable place to exist on a daily basis. And though I haven’t lived there in many, many years, if you’ve ever been there, then like me you know about the fear and hopelessness that chokes or smothers anything that wants to grow. This summer, I hope you will come outside and play in the warm, fertile haven of the garden. You can even bring your notebook. Just be sure to get some dirt under your fingernails. Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons to Write: June-The Discovery Zone

By Christina Katz

If you’ve ever read my books, heard me speak or taken a class with me, then you are no doubt familiar with a drum I beat often and hard: don’t wait to be discovered; produce yourself!

The flip side of my frequent don’t-wait-to-be-discovered admonition is, naturally, to discover yourself. The word “discover” means to see, to get knowledge of, to learn of, to find, to gain sight of, to notice and to realize.
Once you become willing to discover yourself, you have the key to everything-you can know your thoughts, uncover your plans and ambitions, and see the best path right in front of you.

Why is this so important these days? Because if you don’t know which direction you are headed and why, there are more ways to get off the path and into the woods than ever. So if your choices feel like they spoke in too many directions, why not pause and dive back into self-discovery? Even five minutes of self-reflection can get you out of spin mode and reset your clarity of direction. Because if you don’t know who you are, what you are all about, and where you are going, then nobody else is going to get it either.

Why then, would you want to write to become discovered, when the same skill can be used to see and know anything and everything you are ever curious about? When you feel adrift in a sea of choices, don’t reach for the input of others. Reach for your pen or your keyboard and-WOOSH!-you’ll find that you had the power to shine in your capable hands all along. Next thing you know, you are off, making discoveries that can take you and your readers anywhere.

Through writing you can discover a new use for something old. Indeed the process of writing IS a new use for something old: you get to share a seemingly endless stream of words on nothing but good ol’ brainpower. What a joy to discover something for yourself through the process of writing that may have been previously known to others but was unknown to you.

Writing allows you to chance upon ideas, to observe closely or from a distance, to notice what you hadn’t before, to find out things that thrill and dismay you, and to identify, name and claim what is revealed.

When you write to discover, instead of writing to be discovered, you are an active force in the world. You become privy to your own thoughts, your personal passions, your true feelings, your once distant memories, and the very stuff you need to express. Your efforts pay off with exponential rewards, which cannot be topped by literary accolades or rave reviews.

You remember to write for the pure bliss of writing. You come to the center. The seed. The source from which creation springs. And from there, do you really need the adoration or acclaim or attention of others? You don’t. You have it all. The key to creation. The core. The root. And the discovery is divine.

Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons to Write: Write to Sustain Yourself

By Christina Katz Sustenance is an especially good word to describe why I write. I write to sustain myself. I write to nourish myself and others. I write for money, sure. Why shouldn’t I? But I also write to provide for others and to be provided for by my own words. I’ve heard a lot of writers say, “I write because I can’t not write.” In fact, I’ve heard this line so often, it has become a cliché for me. I am capable of not writing. Certainly I’ve had periods in my life where I wrote less than I do now. But if I look more closely at my past, I realize that I was writing. I was journaling and eventually journaling led me back to writing for others. So even when I tend to think I wasn’t writing, I was. I’ve pretty much been writing my entire adult life. I’ve filled notebook after notebook and now I write book after book, article after article, column after column. Sometimes I think I don’t even realize how prolific I am. Conversely, when I write for others, I tend to journal less. Or at least, I tend to journal less formally and more irregularly. Journaling becomes more like jottings. Just a quick splash on paper to figure out what I’m trying to say. When I’m writing a lot, I lean towards a sketchbook page rather than a lined notebook. Perhaps all my deadline writing causes my mind to crave the blank white space. As a kid, I filled a manila folder with my accumulated writings. What is it about the slow accumulation of words, then paragraphs, and finally pages that gives sustenance to the kind of person who loves to write? I relish the alchemy of mind meeting paper. I never tire of it. I delight in the unlimited possibilities. Yet the slow, methodical process of laying down words is grounding, as well. Words are like clay. You can sculpt them into one thing and then smash them back together and start over again. You wouldn’t want to preserve anything but your best work in final form, but you love the grit under your fingernails and the give and take of the words in your hands, you eagerly anticipate the final polished piece. Doesn’t this really describe more than writing because you can’t not write? To me that expression sounds like a mosquito bite that you can’t not scratch. I believe that writing runs a lot deeper than a response to an external irritation. Perhaps the writer is more like the oyster kneading the piece of sand into something exquisite, or the potter kneading the clay into something more than a pot that merely contains. So many writers sure seem to have transformed a nervous habit into something more precious. I have a fairly intense personality, so maybe I write to temper my more extreme urges. Maybe I write because each word is like a tiny weight mooring me a little bit more into this world and preventing me from floating away. Maybe every word of mine I see on paper is a tiny acquisition of myself, the act of self-claiming, the declaration of being. Rather then writing as a raison-d’etre, then, perhaps writing is the affirmation of what already is. A way of saying what is and is not true. Each word a step closer to substance. Each session calling us to become our own disciple. Reminding us to not give ourselves away. But to own it. Every single word. All of it, sustenance. Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons to Write: Write to Avoid Housework

By Christina Katz It’s not a secret that I dislike housekeeping. Relatives have come right out and suggested to my face hiring someone without apologizing for their directness. But I look at this as more of a sign of their intolerance for our wabi-sabi lifestyle than anything else. I’m an author, teacher, and speaker and my husband is a teacher and theater director. Our careers require a certain amount of creative immersion that we happen to enjoy. I realize our relaxed lifestyle isn’t for everyone, but over the years in the class I teach especially for moms, I’ve become something of a mess evangelist. The way it happened is that the moms in my class kept saying they didn’t have time to write. And finally, after tossing out all of my other suggestions, I threw down the gauntlet. Stop cleaning so much. Lower your expectations about a perfectly orderly home. Ask for and expect more help with household chores from the whole family. Is it still a radical idea, even in the new millennium, that the “woman of the house” is not 100 percent responsible for the cleanliness of the house? That time to write has got to come from somewhere. Often women who are home raising kids but are not making a financial contribution feel stuck. They want to start, for example, a writing career from home but their husbands don’t want them to try. They don’t want their wives to make the investment of time and money into becoming a professional who works from home, even though writing is the lowest-investment business you can start-up. Notice I didn’t say writing is a no-investment business. Rather it’s a low-investment business. Now I think we all know where I stand on this idea. I have had students sneak my class onto a credit card without telling their spouse until the class was over. And though, I don’t especially enjoy being privy to such intimate couple dynamics, we get the picture. Women want to learn skills that can help them make money from home so they can have the best of both worlds. What’s wrong with that? So here are some tips for those who not only want to write to avoid housework, but those who need to avoid housework in order to write: 1.    Eschew conformity. Don’t confuse your value as a human being with how clean your home is. I have known some fabulous women who couldn’t cook or clean worth a darn. And if anything, this fact only makes them more charming and memorable to me. 2.    Make housekeeping a team sport. Crank up the music. Give everyone a job. Tackle the worst of it for a couple of hours on the weekends. It’s amazing how much a family can get done when everyone works together. Even very young children love to dust, squirt windows and mirrors and sweep. Get them their own special cleaning tools so they really can contribute. 3.    Hurry up and get paid for writing. The longer you drag your feet and dilly-dally, the more skepticism you’ll be confronted with from others. In all of my years of teaching, I have to say that I have encountered many women who seem to want a guarantee before they commit. I can’t give them that. But I can almost guarantee that if you don’t commit, you won’t succeed. 4.    Read the book, A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder–How Crammed Closets, Cluttered Offices, and On-the-Fly Planning Make the World a Better Place by Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman. Or listen to it on audio while you clean up a little bit between juggling kids and writing gigs. Viva tolerable messiness! Now if I could only get our dogs to pull their weight around here, I’d be all set. Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons To Write: Writing To Persuade

By Christina Katz Maybe you like writing to persuade. I know I do, and I find myself coming back to the skill over and over and over again as a professional communicator. What exactly does writing to persuade mean? Persuasion is simply a way of convincing someone else of your point of view. You can use persuasion to plead your case, sway others to your way of thinking, and as a way of leveraging your influence. But maybe you think writing to persuade should be relegated to the ranks of cheesy sales people trying to shill their wares and hope you should never have to stoop so low. But my fellow writers, we all write to persuade now and again, whether we like it or not. Right? A proposal, pitch and query are examples of types of persuasive writing that all writers must employ. There’s simply no way around selling yourself, unless you aspire to only be read after your death. A couple of great books that can help you out in this lifetime are: The Writer’s Digest Guide to Query Letters by Wendy Burt-Thomas and The Renegade Writer’s Query Letters That Rock by Linda Formichelli and Diana Burrell. Arguing skillfully is a potent tool and writers need to know how and when to use it. So the next time the only thing standing between you and persuading someone else is a blank page, here are some strategies: Don’t rant. Raging on and on in an agitated fashion about your biases has never been a particularly effective call to action or an efficient way to change people’s minds. However, arguing the reverse argument with some passion might be an persuasive way to show just how absurd the opposing point of view is, which may illustrate the wisdom of your perspective. Paint a picture of the positive benefits of your position. Or conversely, paint a picture of the negative impact of a differing point of view. Go with facts whenever possible rather than what might or could happen. Explore a list of reasons as a strategy. Strive to build your argument from the ground up. Don’t start with the frosting on the cupcake if the eggs and oil are  essential for the whole case to hold together. You can also describe the opposite position and then proceed to build a case for how flawed that way of thinking is point by detailed point. Why not try cajoling instead of issuing orders? Be encouraging. Be inspiring. Create a call to action and invoke a sense of what things could be like if everyone would only adhere to your vision. Let your readers know that feeling good will be the result of their allegiance to your cause. Just ask! In the end, people will often do what you suggest or even agree with you, not for any of the reasons above, but simply because you were persistent, invested, and a wee bit insistent. Sometimes people will let you persuade them just to get you to shush up. When writing to persuade, use the tools at your disposal-whatever it takes. Then make your case, take a stand, build your argument, ask for assistance, and get the heck out of there before you make a nuisance of yourself. is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons to Write: Writing for Love

By Christina Katz

Romantic means fanciful, impractical, and unrealistic. As writers, our responsibility is to cultivate passion while not letting it cloud our better judgment when we need it. We need to fall in love with words and sustain that love affair over time, while not letting our fanciful relationship spill over into our perceptions of real, live people, not to mention business negotiations. We must be a hopeless romantic in love with the act of writing, while protecting our sense of self from the arrows and slings of critics and other careless individuals.

Lest this sound easy, it’s not. I spent half a decade in my twenties cultivating the romantic side of the writing life without due respect for the more practical side. I sat in cafés in Chicago, journal on the table, favorite pen in hand, staring out the window, or reading accounts of other writer’s lives and dreaming of how my writer’s life would compare some day. In retrospect, I realize how my imagination was actually limited by these accounts rather than being liberated or sparked by them. Very much the way a person might become hooked on soap operas to fulfill a missing sense of having a life, so too my writing life was kept a fantasy.

I wasn’t spurred to creating my writer’s life by reading these books, rather I was becoming more entrenched in the observer’s seat. Like The Little Match Girl, staring through the glass at the bakery sweets, but doing nothing to actually feed herself, I was killing my dream through inaction.

Okay, maybe I’m being a bit dramatic. But this is a column about romance, after all. Therefore, let’s get straight to the recovery portion of our tale. If you identify with my former plight, and feel that you would rather sit back and read about other people’s writing successes rather than make sound progress towards your own, there are steps you can take that will offer immediate relief:

Step 1. Don’t get stuck as the observer.
Take all of your books, magazines, movies and other materials that elevate other people’s writing lives and put them away for a time. Or only read them as a reward for actual productivity. For example, if you’d rather read a writing magazine than write a personal essay, then don’t allow yourself to read the magazine until you’ve written draft one of your story. Then read the magazine as a reward.

Step 2. Identify a specific heart’s desire.
Where is your romance of being a writer going? It’s difficult to succeed in this craft if you have multiple destinations. Too many writers overwhelm themselves with many goals, ultimately accomplishing none. So, choose the one goal you really want. If that’s publishing personal essays, so be it. If it’s writing features for national magazines, okay. If you dream of becoming a published novelist, great (it’s a long road, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t embark on it). Don’t judge your goal, it’s not better or worse than anyone else’s. Just figure yours out.

Step 3. Make a list of appropriate action steps.
Now take your ultimate goal, even if it’s many years away, and break it down into steps. Go ahead and number one to twenty on the page and then fill in the steps from the end backwards that will accomplish your goal to the best of your ability. If you have gaps, consult how-to materials that deal in very specific terms with your goal. There are so many more how-to guides than there ever were before. Hooray! Get your hands on those you need.

Step 4. Choose the steps that will create results.
If you are a romantic, the time has come to compartmentalize what you read. Once you realize that inspiration is entertainment and not how-to, you are free to enjoy a healthy relationship with inspirational authors without imagining that your life is theirs. Once you choose even one step on your journey toward writing success and take it, you transform your story from a fantasy…to a reality.

When you are done with these steps, you will be so much closer to your goal than you were after reading ten inspirational books. What could be more idyllic than that?

Christina Katz is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.

Reasons To Write: Write for Pleasure

By Christina Katz I had been teaching writing for about a year when I noticed something about writing for pleasure vs. writing for publication. Both intentions seemed to produce equally strong results for my writing students. In fact, when comparing writing assignments between the two classes, I often felt students in my writing for pleasure classes were producing superior results compared to my writing for publication students. There was only one problem, and it was a big one. The difficulty came when it was time to match the strong writing with markets that would pay. My writing for pleasure students were ill prepared for the kind of strategic thinking needed to treat writing like a business. They were more often prone to magical thinking, which is fun, but tends to yield scant results. The magical thinking went like this: I wrote well therefore I will get published. Unfortunately, putting wonderful words on the page won’t guarantee publication. An eloquent writer needs a whole list of professional skills to become a professional writer who can find the best publication opportunities for his or her work. Does this mean that writing for pleasure is a waste of time? Definitely not! Writing for pleasure can help you flex many muscles as a writer. Here are just a few examples: Strengthen your voice: When you write for pleasure you can let your voice rip. A conversational tone will assist you not only when you are writing for enjoyment, but also when you are writing on assignment or for pay. A knack for writing in an informal tone will carry over to whatever writing you do. And when you have a deadline, leaning into your voice to get a first draft down on the page can really help you get the job done. When you can’t seem to find your voice, forgo the computer and try writing by hand. Even if that means rewriting what you’ve already drafted with a keyboard. Discover meaningful topics: What are you going to write about? When you can’t come up with fresh material, writing for pleasure can help you uncover ideas you might otherwise miss. A writer is only as prolific as her next topic. If you feel blocked, get out a piece of paper and start writing a letter to a close friend. Spill your guts. Tell your friend everything you want to say. This is a sure-fire strategy for making sure you never run out of material. Just make sure the “friend” is someone you trust, so you won’t censor. Explore structure organically: If you struggle to make smooth transitions in your writing, writing for pleasure can help you get out of your own way. When you write quickly, without the self-consciousness that can come from anticipating your editor’s red pen, you will naturally create smooth transitions. Once you get the hang of trusting yourself and just letting one paragraph dovetail into the next, your words will flow. When in doubt, set your writing aside to cool off a bit. Then tweak for strong transitions. Uncover deep thoughts and authentic beliefs: Say something fresh. Epiphanies and surprises are key to writing success. Readers really don’t want to hear the same old, same old. Say something you didn’t realize you thought. If it’s a surprise to you, chances are good that it will also be a surprise to the reader. If you focus on telling your specific truth, you’ll avoid the posturing, big words and overly formal language pitfalls that dog beginning writers. You’ve got something to say, so say it! Enjoy the process: I don’t know about you, but the pleasure of writing was a primary reason I wanted a career as a writer. Writing can be cathartic. Writing can be an escape. Writing can be an exploration. Writing can be so many things. Why limit yourself to the drudgery of only writing because you have to, when you can also write simply because you love to write? is the author of Get Known Before the Book Deal, Use Your Personal Strengths to Build an Author Platform and Writer Mama, How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids (both for Writer’s Digest Books). A platform development coach and consultant, she teaches writing career development, hosts the Northwest Author Series, and is the publisher of several e-zines including Writers on the Rise. Christina blogs at The Writer Mama Riffs and Get Known Before the Book Deal, and speaks at MFA programs, literary events, and conferences around the country.