HOW TO QUIET THE NASTY VOICE IN YOUR HEAD

A while back, the perfect metaphor for how the critic works hit me

It was during an IG Live: its long list of reasons why you won't ever be able to finish your book, write something meaningful, and on and on is just like a cover band's set list.

Think of the band that plays at weddings.

There's a list of songs they know people expect. They will get the result they want from playing these familiar songs: dancing.

Your critic is exactly the same. If you think about it, the lines it hits you with right when you're getting into flow are not new to you. You've heard them before, am I right?

Most of my students and clients can provide a list of judgements their critic has with very little effort.

Any of these top 10 hits sound familiar?

This isn't any good
You're terrible at this
What a waste of time
How can you be so selfish when the world is a mess

The critic trots these out as soon as you're getting decent work done, because it knows how to get the result it wants from you:

Stop writing — it’s too scary.

This is how it makes you dance. But what if we turned the tables?

Flipping the script on the critic.

The method I use, which has the benefit of being simultaneously effective and hilarious, is this:

Take what your critic is saying to you and sing it along with one of these catchy, suitable-for-wedding-reception hits.

Full disclosure: I may have gotten a little carried away compiling these, but it was really fun to make.

Just try to feel bad about "writing total shit" when you sing that along to Fleetwood Mac's "Go Your Own Way."

You are writing totalllllll shit!

Sing it with me. Louder!

Same with Waste of time, waste of time, ha! ha! ha! ha! Waste of tiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiime to "Stayin' Alive." It's perfection. Apply the Bee Gees, and the criticism becomes meaningless. Do you feel the critic getting nervous?

The effect of this is the miracle of any earworm song: encasing that nasty statement from the critic in hilarity. Very much like the boggart that was negated by the ridiculous.

It's really hard to feel bad about wasting time when you're dancing along with John Travolta, right?

Make that critic dance, and shimmy free of its control. It's easier than you think.

Now, let’s get back to writing!

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BUDGETING FOR YOUR WRITING LIFE

How much income do I need as a writer?

This is a whopper of a question, but it’s a smart one to ask as you build your writing life.

Here are the essential questions to consider when budgeting for a thriving writing life:

• Where do I live (and what is the cost of living there)?

• What are my basic monthly expenses?

• Do I have debt to account for?

• What do I have in savings?

• How much money do I need to feel secure and comfortable?

• What is my ultimate goal?

Rent. Ouch!

Where do I live (and what does that cost?)

I can speak from experience here. Before Berlin, I lived in incredibly expensive cities.

I was in California for 20 years. First San Francisco and then in LA.

Maintaining the standard of living there was brutal, but the community was amazing and I made so many wonderful connections.

I took wonderful writing workshops. I was meeting amazing writers all the time. A lot of the early success of The Secret Library Podcast was due to being able to go to a bookstore event, meet an incredible author, buy their book, talk to them and invite them on the show.

But Los Angeles was a mixed bag because the cost was excruciating.

Are the benefits of your location worth the cost?

This can go both ways - if you live in a remote area and have very low overhead, the ‘cost’ can show up as increased difficult to find community or attend events.

What is most important for you?

What are my basic monthly expenses?

Categories to consider:

• Housing

• Utilities

• Food

• Healthcare and wellness

• Transportation

• Taxes

• Loan or debt payments

Know the totals or averages for each of these categories

This can be a scary thing to add up. However, I can say that every time I’ve done this exercise it’s ended up being less grim than I expected, even when I had significant debt to deal with.

You may have additional categories to these. If so, add them. I see these as the basics, but we have others in our list, such as:

• Entertainment

• Travel

• Education / Training
  

Once you know your numbers, you can make more empowered choices.

A word about debt

A lesson I learned from Bari Tessler that was hugely helpful: debt is easier to pay off when you see it as a celebration of something you chose to spend on.

Rather than thinking of paying off a credit card balance as a yucky task, if you used the card to go on a much-needed vacation, Bari suggests calling these payments something like “my Italian adventure.”

Even if you have to call the payments “my rebellious 20s” or “Finding my personal style” due to spending choices we might not make now, we can acknowledge that we learned from the experience.

The big bonus is: the debt tends to get paid of faster when we don’t resent it.

Total it up, give it a fun name in your budget, and keep moving ahead.

What about savings?

Saving can be just as loaded as debt. After all, when we’re building a writing life we often don’t have a lot of extra to work with.

However, I’ve found that automating my savings has been a huge help. I use N26 Bank for my business, and whenever money comes into it that’s over 50 Euro, it gets sorted into a tax account and a savings account. I get to define the percentage and it happens without me having to think about it.

If you never saw it, you won’t miss money as much

It can be a small percentage, like 5% to start, but as you see this increase, it will help.

As a creative, I often had to take jobs that were a bad fit because I needed the income. Learning to save became easier when I realized an important secret:

A healthy savings account gives you a superpower: the ability to say no.

Once I had a month, and then a few months’ worth of expenses saved, I didn’t have to accept any job that came my way. I could wait for the right fit, and eventually I could go full-time working for myself.

It can feel dry and restrictive to save and not have access to all your income right away, but I promise that the opposite is true: the more savings you have, the freer you are.

It’s ok to go slow. Some banks even have an app that will round any purchase up to the nearest dollar/pound/euro etc and put that amount in savings. It’s a few cents at a time, but that can get your started without serious deprivation.

How much do I need to feel safe and comfortable?

This is a crucial piece of information, as it’s so personal. Some people are ok with a bank account that’s close to empty. Others go into a panic and can’t focus on anything until that’s remedied.

You know who you are, so plan accordingly.

Those who need a solid buffer will likely do better with a day job that covers everything. Those who are ok with uncertainly could potentially work part time and tolerate the stress of getting creative to cover the gap.

What it boils down to is this question:

What do you need control over more: your income or your time?

High-paying jobs expect a lot of your time, as a rule, while lower hourly or salaried part-time work is more flexible. There are exceptions to this, of course, but it’s helpful to know if you’ll feel more secure with a higher salary and are ok with less control over your schedule.

If you suffocate with others dictating your time, the higher salary isn’t going to be worth it, unless it’s to fulfill a goal you value just as much.

What’s my ultimate goal?

This is the most essential question of all.

Once you’ve reflected on all these points, it’s time to look at the big picture.

What do you want your writing life to look like over the next few years?

Do you want to be a full-time writer, or are you happy writing as a second stream of income or even as a hobby?

Knowing the end goal can help you plan more effectively now. If you want to write full-time, then taking a high-paid job for a defined period to pay off debt and build up adequate savings to feel secure is an effective plan.

If, however, you see writing as a secondary income stream as your goal, and primarily a source of fun, it’s more important to have work that will be tolerable long-term and cover as much of your expenses as possible.

With these thoughts in mind, re-visit the questions above.

Once I knew I wanted to write and teach writing as my primary income, it was clear we needed to leave LA and find a place that was less expensive. Berlin fit all of our needs and has lowered overhead without sacrificing the cultural hub that we had in LA.

Go slowly with these questions. Let them percolate.

Let’s keep this conversation going!

*Once again, I recommend Bari Tessler’s The Art of Money. Both the book and workbook are excellent resources as you work through these questions.

We’ll continue this conversation in the next post.

Read the whole series:

• Part One: Creating a Writing Life

• Part Two: Writing Day Jobs, an Overview

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HOW TO SUPPORT YOURSELF AS A WRITER

THIS POST WAS ALSO RECORDED FOR THE SECRET LIBRARY PODCAST

Prefer to listen? Click here.

What drove me to quit my career to become a writer:

My grandmother died.

I sat at her bedside, remembering both my grandmother’s lives and all the choices that they wanted to make that weren't available to them.

My father's mother desperately wanted to study physics. She was certainly smart enough.

In high school she sat down in the classroom and the teacher looked up at his new student.

“I don't teach girls. Get out.”

And she had to leave. She spent her whole life reasonably angry about not having access to the experiences that she wanted. This was just one example.

I realized that if I wanted to be a writer, but didn’t risk becoming one, I wasn't honoring the options available to me.

I wasn’t honoring what my grandmothers missed based on when they were born.

My grandmother, also an artist long after being rejected in the physics classroom

I decided I was just going to become a writer (as if I knew what that meant)

There were a number of issues I had to address.

At 25, I knew I needed to make income and deal with debt.

I had to find a job and clarify how much control of my time I was going to have.

Having studied psychology, I was concerned about the stress of potentially working long hours before finally being able to write.

The issue with working as a psychotherapist was that the job was emotionally demanding enough that I had no energy left to write.

How to make money without giving away all my energy?

Let's just get into the money, shall we?

I've tried pretty much every day job that's available and I think it boils down to:

• What fits

• What your priorities are for your circumstances

I didn't want to make book sales my primary income

That was never my goal. I didn't want to be independently publishing a book a month and building up a library of income generating writing.

I knew it wouldn't work for me to come up with a new idea and churn it out that quickly. I wanted to take time and linger with books and go really deep with them.

Let’s look at everything I tried.

All the day jobs I’ve had since 25:

• Knitting shop

• Bookshop

• Marketing manager/ director for several companies

• Project Manager

• Editor

• Writing Team Manager

• Proofreader at an Ad Agency

• Exec Assistant

• Teacher (of knitting, English as a second language, and writing)

All of these jobs involved me working for someone else, as a consultant or employee.

For a long time, I believed working for others was the only way to make my life work.

My first business died a very dramatic death in 2008.

I had a small client list. I didn't have a podcast. It wasn't really enough to cover everything. And when the clients went away, all of my savings went away too.

For the next ten years, I felt nothing but terror at the thought of being the one in charge. Of not having any sort of company or support outside of myself to rely on.

Self-employment or Employee: which is right for you as a writer?

Questions to ask:

• How much money do you need to make?

• What is your risk tolerance?

• What’s the priority: money or time?

A few guidelines here:

Be honest with yourself about how much money you need to feel safe and comfortable. If part of nurturing yourself creatively is eating out regularly, budget for it.

You won’t thrive as a writer if you box yourself into a stifling life.

In addition, there’s no right answer here. Many people thrive in a day job and learn a lot from that work to fuel their writing, and feel more creative when the stress of earning money from self-employment is lifted.

Others are the opposite.

And to make things even more complicated, this can change through your life.

When I was in my 30s, after I lost my business, the idea of starting another one was too much and I needed time as an employee.

Now, in my 40s, I am thriving working for myself developing courses and working with clients.

Be honest with yourself and you’ll build the writing life that is best suited for you.

In the meantime, make an honest list of your expenses and what you need to warn to feel safe and start brainstorming what work could bring that in.

*A great resource is Bari Tessler’s material on The Art of Money. Both the book and workbook are wonderful companions to this part of the process.

We’ll continue this conversation in the next post.

Read the whole series:

• Part One

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HOW TO BUILD A WRITING LIFE

THIS POST WAS ALSO RECORDED FOR THE SECRET LIBRARY PODCAST

Prefer to listen? Click here.

What is the goal you have for your writing?

Goal can be kind of an icky word. It feels really hustle culture and feels like an energy of grinding something out.

So I don't want to introduce that question in that sort of spirit.

Think about when you were little and what you wanted from writing.

What did you imagine?
What did you hope?
What was your big dream?

That's what I mean by the goal for your writing.

Maybe “what is the dream for your writing?” is a better question.

I encourage you to journal about it, if possible, soon after reading this blog post, because we're going to come back to that question in a later post in this series.

Once we've considered a lot of the themes that we'll explore together, that answer will feel even better, like you are easing into a direction that feels really good. At least that's my hope.

Here’s the story of how I built my cobbled-together writing life

And I don't want you to have the impression that this is some quick fix checklist.

You're not necessarily going to get there in two months, or even two years. That’s ok.

This is a series of wrong turns, mistakes, occasionally getting it right, stories of being too scared to take the step that I wanted to, and the consequences of ultimately making those choices.

This process has taken, and it makes me a little ill to say it, 20 years.

So not ready, while thinking I absolutely was ready, to be a “proper” writer.

It began when I was 25.

I had finished my master's degree in psychology. I was about to be a registered intern to become a psychotherapist. Yes, that young creature above had been seeing clients for over a year.

While I had loved studying and while I loved working with people in certain capacities, I realized that this was not the direction I ultimately wanted to take.

The reason I didn't want to be a psychotherapist was because I wanted to be a writer.

And I realized that I had been building this process. I had been taking all the steps that I had taken because I was fascinated by people and how they worked.

But what I really wanted to do was write about them. At 25, I left my perfectly good job determined to figure out how I could become a writer.

We’ll continue this story in a series of posts. Stay tuned for part 2.

Click here to listen to the original episode.

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HOW TO WRITE PRODUCTIVELY (WITHOUT BURNING OUT)

How to make progress when writing your book:

After discussing book-planning mistakes last week, I've been thinking a lot about other beliefs that appear productive, but aren’t.

The desire to do more, more, more has crept in like a virus.

In reality, the push to supersize our lives has been in the works for far longer than that. Often the feeling that we need more and need to be more is what keeps us overworked in service to acquiring things.

The impact hits us hard, especially for our creativity, for several reasons:

Creativity doesn't like to be quantified or supersized.

It simply wants to exist for its own sake. Our creative self doesn't shout from the rooftops with a megaphone the way the critic does. The creative self slips into the in-between moments, when things are quiet and perhaps even, >gasp< boring.

Remember those?

Sometimes the most productive thing to do is … nothing.

When we get sucked into the “more is better” mentality, it infects our writing process, too.

If I write 1,000 words a day, then surely writing 2,000 words a day is better? Right?

Not necessarily.

Writing doesn’t always look like typing at the keyboard.

In a much-beloved episode of the Secret Library Podcast, V.E. Schwab shared this observation. There are a lot of activities that make up writing a book, and many of them don’t look like writing at all.

Your process might include:

• Reading

• Watching documentaries

• Going for a walk to think

• Doodling

• Talking to friends

• Staring into space

• Getting ideas in the shower and flailing around to write them down

• Taking a nap

Activities that support writing are also writing

It takes energy and fuel to write a book, and our writing time is just as much about gathering creative firewood as it is about making the fire.

Writing for days and weeks on end without re-fueling is like driving a car until it runs out of gas, or expecting a fire to keep burning when there’s no more wood.

If you want to write efficiently, plan refueling in advance

Many people believe that going on a writing retreat is productive because you can write a bazillion hours a day.

In fact, I find the productivity of a retreat comes from the increased time for refueling.

Even on retreat, I write about 2 hours a day max.

I spend the rest of the day refueling:

• reading

• napping

• talking about books over meals

• staring into space

• taking walks

• browsing in bookshops

The fact that refueling is taking up at least half the day supercharges those two hour writing sessions on retreat.

You can get this same effect in regular life if you add at least one refueling break for every two writing sessions.

If you want to get more out of the time you spend writing, plan refueling breaks along with your writing time.

Your refueling may look different than anyone else’s. You know best what perks you up when you feel run down or burnt out.

Keep a list of those activities and make sure you include them in your schedule alongside your writing.

The critic may try to tell you they aren’t actually writing. Ignore it.

If you exercise, you need to stretch, too. This is no different.

Stay refueled and you’ll get way more writing done in a shorter time. This is counter-intuitive, but after hundreds of clients and students have had the same experience, I can confidently share it with you here.

Put those refueling breaks in your calendar now and see the result in days.

Ready to write without a blueprint holding you back? I made this guide for you.