writermag.com • The Writer | 33begin nowhere. You don’t know how to bring for-
ward the best ideas and leave the others on a back
burner for later. Again, FOMO is your enemy
here, the fear that you’ll choose the wrong project
instead of the very idea that will take your writing
to the next level.
WHAT TO DO: Master your own focus. When
patients come into an emergency room, they are
triaged: the most seriously ill get attention first,
the least serious last. As the midwife of your work,
you must learn to do this as well, allowing your
most urgent work to get the attention it needs.
- Write out all of your ideas that are truly in
contention. Then tune into your heart and
your gut – your reservoirs of truth – and ask:
Which ideas can wait without causing me pain
or losing their intensity? Which feel most
urgent? Which projects tap most deeply into
my core values – those ideas and missions that
most define who I am and what I stand for? - If you had to choose just two of your ideas or
projects, which two would you choose? Can
you work on them simultaneously? How?
3
PROBLEM: You have too many com-
peting desires or responsibilities.
There is so much you want to do with
your writing, but you have family responsibilities,
finite time, or limited resources. You also want to
travel, paint, or go to grad school for your MBA.
Can you have it all?
WHAT TO DO: We are all guilty of black-and-
white thinking, which is restrictive and narrow
and leads us to believe our options are finite. There
may be things you simply cannot put on a back
burner while you pursue your writing or other
goals. That said, nobody made a rule that you can’t
carve out time to pursue your own interests. Are
your responsibilities truly getting in the way, or are
they a convenient distraction? Is the problem that
you have too much to take care of or that you take
on roles that keep you from writing? It’s easy to feel
everything else is more important than putting
words on a page. But it’s not true.
- If family or work duties are interfering, can
you swap time with a co-worker or spouse, or
get creative with your hours? When my hus-
band was transitioning from full-time mental
health work to opening a bookstore, he
arranged to work longer hours but fewer days,
then used the extra day to pursue his business
goals. When I was transitioning from full-time mental
health work to becoming a potter, I found a flexible job
doing contract psychological testing and used my off
hours to take pottery classes. How can you get creative
with your time and responsibilities? What can you give
up in order to clear space for yourself? Who do you need
to get permission from?
+ Often, we decide the important things we want to do can-
cel out the other important things we want to do, but
sometimes that isn’t true – and by thinking creatively
about our options, we see paths we didn’t see before.
“What’s possible?” is one of my favorite life-coaching ques-
tions. It’s meant to spur people to dig deep, reach high.
Notice we don’t ask, “Is anything possible?” The phrasing
of the first question assumes that possibilities are out there
and that our job is to expand our thinking to find them.
For example, if you want to write and travel, can you look
for travel writing opportunities? Or find ways to write
from the road? Can you divide your time between activi-
ties – writing on weeknights, road-tripping on weekends?
+ You don’t have to solve for everything at once. Keep pull-
ing back the blinds, looking forward, trying new tactics
to get you where you want to go. Evolution is a process,
not a leap.
+ We do not have to be monogamous to our art form. Most
people pursuing their art have competing duties and pas-
sions. It’s up to us to figure out how to make things work.
+ Another great life coaching question is, “What if it were
easy?” We often assume what we want to do is going to
be hard, or too hard, or even harder than we thought it
would be. But guess what: it might be easier than you
think. Stay open to the possibility of something being
easy, rather than going immediately to “gloom and
doom.” Also, when we are working toward our goals, the
hard edge of difficulty is softened by enthusiasm and the
knowledge that we have gotten into the ring at last.4
PROBLEM: You have ideas that you do not
know how to bring to light.
You want to write a book or a short story or get
published, but you have no idea how to begin.WHAT TO DO: Spend less time saying “I don’t know how”
to the wrong people (i.e., those who can’t help you) and start
saying it to the right people.
+ Hire a mentor or coach. I can’t stress enough the impact
one-on-one writing help can have. I’ve had lots of men-
tors, some better than others, but they all moved me for-
ward in some way.
+ Find other people doing what you want to do and ask
them how they got there. Don’t be afraid they’ll be
annoyed – most people love to help, as long as you don’t
make a pest of yourself.