The Ultimate Course for the Aspiring Writer
The Ultimate Course for the Aspiring Writer:
Lesson 2
Battle Your Laziness
The year is 2020, a turning point in the War on Laziness. The aspiring writer begins to tip the balance in their favor, but laziness will not give in without a lackluster fight. The months wear on and the writer becomes weary. They struggle at their job. They need more money. Their relationships suffer. Each day, the writer suppresses the forces of laziness with great effort. Each day, the two sides meet ready to wage war.
What choice does the writer have? Surrender is not an option, but some days resources are so limited and one begins to wonder whether the fight is worth fighting. The writer surely misses their friends and family, they must desperately want to return to the comfort of their bed and shut their eyes to the world at war. But the writer does not give in. For they have seen the wastelands of indifference laziness has left behind, and they know too well what damage it will do if left uninterrupted.
So the writer will fight each day, for the rest of their life if they must, defending their hopes and dreams for a self-sustaining future, inspiring future writers to enlist in the noble cause against laziness. No longer will Word documents be left blank and LinkedIn profiles untouched. No more will the world be subjected to this indifference.
The revolution is now!
Identify the Source of Your Lack of Motivation
Pardon the makeshift war story, I couldn’t resist.
Laziness is a cruel enemy. It protects itself from our immediate concerns by masquerading as a small issue.
But it is in fact a very large issue that plagues us all in varying degrees.
And the ways in which we can effectively combat laziness in our vastly differing lives are not always that easy to find and stick to.
What causes you to lose the motivation to become the writer you have always wanted to be?
Until I found freelance writing, I eventually and inevitably lost interest in every possible career path or personal project I laid my hands on.
Whether it was programming, marketing, audio engineering, environmental studies, no matter what, the pattern was always the same:
Find a new thing
Become SUPER excited about it for somewhere between a few days to a month
Eat sleep and breathe the new thing
Become entirely bored of it and seek a new thing. Every. Single. Time.
As I am certain you can relate, aspiring writer, there is nothing more frustrating than wanting more than anything to find a passion you can really sink your teeth into, only to time and time again be severely disappointed by how rapidly the excitement dissolves.
It is not unlike a new relationship.
Are You Still Chasing Butterflies?
The first time you date someone you really dig, the feeling of butterflies is truly overwhelming.
You want to spend every waking moment with that person and they are all you can think about, all the time.
You may have even sent love letters and passed notes to a high school sweetheart.
The level of infatuation during that stage of the relationship feels unlimited and it seems like you will feel this way about that person until the end of time.
But then what happens? For most first-timers, the butterflies eventually go away.
And all of a sudden you don’t look at the person the same way, think about them as much, and your feelings for them sort of just… fade.
You struck out, kid. Tough luck.
Relationships come in two forms:
passionate love (involves intense feelings and sexual attraction)
compassionate love (involves feelings of mutual respect, trust and affection).
The ‘butterflies’ scenario I just described is clearly an example of passionate love.
But compassionate love is the kind that stands the test of time.
We see examples of this kind of love in long lasting marriages, usually old couples, often our grandparents, and most of us deep down find ourselves longing to find this kind of relationship.
But believe it or not, this also applies to becoming a paid writer.
Determine your Relationship with your Career Path
Stop to consider any of your past failed attempts at trying to find a career path.
Even if they were unrelated to writing, think about your attitude at the beginning and the end of each of your efforts.
Now, picture each of these attempts as past relationships between you and the career paths you chose to pursue. Ask yourself:
“Were these relationships passionate or compassionate?”
Did you think about it? Chances are, you answered that they were passionate.
If my calculations are correct, you were genuinely optimistic and excited about the new direction you tried to take, but in the end your feelings about the direction you were headed changed and you scrapped the idea altogether.
So what’s the lesson here? It’s this:
Stop chasing butterflies. Start searching for the right one.
Cringy metaphors aside, the lesson is a good one: taking the time to make sure you are going to pursue a field you can sustainably put the effort into is so key.
In order to know you can go the distance, whether you want to consider blog posting, copywriting, etc., it’s important to:
Know exactly what the job entails.
Not everything we hear through the grapevine is 100% accurate, so do the research and get to know the intimate details of your career path.
What you’ll be writing about, who you’ll be writing for, what skills you’ll need, how much you can make; you should understand all of these things before diving in head first and finding out later that it just wasn’t meant to be.
Know what you are capable of.
Does data entry make your mind numb but you could blog 24/7? Are you fascinated by academic papers while copywriting feels like torture?
Do yourself a favor and figure out what you like and what you loathe.
That way, you’ll have a much easier time finding that right path, which leads us to our next point.
Find your niche.
Once you’ve gotten a good idea of what kind of writing you like to do, it is time to hone in on your specialty.
You should focus on your strengths, talents, and passions the same as you did to learn what you really care about, and use that to really nail down a writing niche you can call home.
In a way, you have to do some soul searching to really nail it down, clearing away any outside projections on what you truly want in your professional life, separating your beliefs and desires from what you think people expect from you.
If you follow these steps and remember my cringy metaphor, you will find yourself on a career path that makes laziness obsolete.
When you are pursuing a real passion that engages you and is thought-provoking in all the right ways, you will wake up every day unable to stay in bed and excited about getting your new ideas on paper and out into the world. It is an awesome feeling…
You Can't Fool Yourself
Why do soldiers write war stories?
At first thought, one might speculate that reliving those horrors would be a tortuous venture not worth putting oneself through.
I’m sure in some ways it’s an even more grueling task for a soldier to re-access those memories and make sense of the seemingly incomprehensible than it was to live through them in the first place. So why bother?
Military Experience and the Arts, Inc’s Editor-in-Chief, David Ervin puts it well:
“…I’d venture to say that most war writers put pen to paper because we must simply do something with these awful memories. We must transform them into something that has a value or meaning outside of being simply bad memories. Writing is a constructive means of externalizing some potent internal emotions, and if engaging in it helps someone along the way of healing, then it’s all that much more meaningful.”
(I learned a lot from David Ervin on this subject and I recommend checking out the whole article here.)
Transforming personal memories into something of value or meaning, externalizing internal emotions, and helping someone along the way; don’t you just love when things come full circle, aspiring writer? Me too!
Whether you’re writing your sweetheart, telling painful war stories, or searching for the writing career you’ve always dreamed of, it’s all about digging deep.
You can tell anyone and everyone how excited you are about some new direction you’re heading, but if you don’t really believe in it yourself, I’ve got news for you: it’s not going to happen.
The one person in the world you can’t fool is yourself.
And at the root of fooling yourself is where our sworn enemy, Laziness, seizes its opportunity to thwart your efforts.
But now that you are well equipped to win that war, I will leave you to plan your battle strategies, map out the terrain, and inspire your comrades.
Godspeed, my friend.
Class dismissed!
Stay tuned for the next installment of The Ultimate Course for the Aspiring Writer: Lesson 3!
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