Get in the Game: Writer Tools to Help You Flourish
By: Tilted Writer Musings
Tags: Writers On Writing, Creative Process, Writers On Medium, Fiction, Writing

You’ve worked hard to get where you are. You’ve put in your time, diagrammed sentences, completed mind maps, and learned the (often torturous) intricacies of the English language. There have been classes, experimental styles, and good (and painful) critiques. You’ve typed until your fingers ache, and you’ve created characters, killed villains, and resurrected heroes to be even better than they were before. You’ve blown up buildings, brought gods to tears, and derailed trains.

Whew! Now you’re ready to publish. What’s next?

Spoiler alert: the decisions you have to make won’t suddenly start getting easier.

Thought it was tough killing off your favorite character? Think again. It’s really hard to decide who trust now that your book is ready to go through the rigorous pre-publishing demands.

Do you go Indie or do you go traditional? Not to add undue weight to this decision, but choosing the correct publishing path for you is a decision that will affect the entire trajectory of your writing career. (No pressure.)

Creativity Used to Be Enough

And it IS enough if what you want to do is get a story onto paper. If you want to write your book and stash it in the cabinet for future branches of the family tree to peruse at their leisure, creativity is absolutely enough. But if you want to publish, you need to be prepared for a brand-new world. Gone are the days when publishing houses handled everything from marketing to travel to author appearances. Now, they expect authors to handle much of these necessary things on their own — in addition to continuing to write. That means, in addition to creativity, it’s time to hone your organizational and people-ing skills. (This is what ends up biting some of us in the butt.)

Your high school English teacher may have taught you techniques like meditation and mind-mapping to clear your head and help you get your thoughts on paper. But what about now? What if you’re getting paid to write? Or what if you’re on a major deadline? What your English teacher failed to mention is that IRL, you’ll have calendars staring back at you and bosses who breathe over your shoulder demanding creativity and inspiration…before the meeting that starts in five minutes. When your paycheck depends on delivering genius-level creativity, things get incrementally more complicated for your muse. (It tends to get a little performance shy.)

As a creative, you have several skills and traits you should leverage. Here are Seven Mega Skills you have and how they can help you turn ordinary words into magic on the page:

1. You get bored easily. You need new scenery, new activities. This is great because it means you’re always up for a challenge or an adventure. If start to feel stifled or antsy — or if you write yourself into a corner and feel stuck — you’ll know it’s time to do something crazy, wacky, different to help you stretch your creative muscles.

Trait Superpower: You aren’t afraid to speak up if things don’t make sense. This gives you the chutzpah reach out to people you don’t know, learn new things, and push yourself outside your comfort zone. Getting bored is awesome if you channel that feeling into positive forward momentum.

2. You’re spontaneous and impulsive. Have you ever heard that you’re flighty or unfocused? Ever put the car keys in the refrigerator while writing stories in your head? Let’s talk due dates. Have you ever faced a 24-hour countdown, and instead of putting your butt in the chair, you ended up at alpaca farm for “creative inspiration”? If these scenarios sound remotely plausible, we get you.

Trait Superpower: You’re highly creative with thoughts and colors and emotions and ideas flying at you 100 miles per minute. It’s really no surprise the car keys are in the freezer, because you have WAY bigger things on your mind. This trait makes you inquisitive, flexible, and able to see things from different perspectives. Lean into that!

3. You’re brave. Your mom knew it in Kindergarten when you told the stranger his cigarette was gross. Your writing teacher knew it when you chose to document your trip to Dachau instead of writing about your summer vacation to Florida. You make mistakes, but you learn and move forward. You’re good, and even better, you want to keep learning.

Trait Superpower: You’re able to shove your fears and doubts behind you, which is cool in the publishing world, because you will get good feedback, interesting feedback, and eventually, scathing feedback. You’re a kickass writer, so keep on believin’…and keep on writing fearlessly.

4. You’re a thinker and a doer. You don’t sit by the sidelines and wait for others to show you how things are done. You roll up your sleeves, get to work, and pour all of your energy into whatever project you’re currently tackling. You’re a leader, and you love innovative ideas. This means you’ll come up with story ideas that are fabulously outside the box, and you’ll take them on without hesitation.

Trait Superpower: You don’t follow the flow of traffic. Instead, you find a new way. Your stories are innovative, and you find ways to say things from different perspectives. Your energy and determination will push you even during the rare times when your creativity muscle gets tired.

5. You’re curious and tenacious. Try to dissuade you from your fact-sniffing trail? No way. Convince you to back down from building a juicy plotline? Don’t think so. On the lookout for the latest insider news? Bet your bottom dollar you know about it.

Trait Superpower: You’re always up for a new twist or book idea, and most things intrigue you enough to at least do a little digging. You’re a learner, and your internet browser will likely confirm that by revealing searches on everything from murder weapons to sunken ships. What’s that mean? You’ll never run out of ideas!

6. You break the rules. Rules, schmules…am I right? Let’s talk tradition. My 5th grade teacher would have become apoplectic if our study group had re-enacted Romeo and Juliet in modern rap. But how bad is that really? Out of everything that could happen to modern literature, rapping about Romeo seems fairly harmless. Same thing with grammar; there are worse things than breaking a rule to support the voice or tone or a character. Ain’t nothin’ but a thing!

Trait Superpower: You know the rules, but you’re flexible and creative. You sang the preposition song as a kid, you were traumatized by spelling bees, and you know the difference between there, their, and they’re. BUT you’ve reached a point in your professional and creative life where you can BREAK THE RULES and LOVE LIFE! You know you can have fun with words and make them work for you — and that’s a hella superpower.

7. You’re an Independent worker.

This one might be a bit controversial, but we’re gonna go there right now. Ask a few creative people how they feel about breaking into teams for a project. I’m guessing a majority of them will give you one of three responses:

· Many of them will immediately pretend to have an aggressive outbreak of hives and scratch violently until they are able to prematurely exit the meeting. Or possibly even until you offer to call an ambulance. This whole group work thing is no joke to people who breathe into paper bags at the thought of interactions with several people at once.

· Your entire team will claim an unprecedented and unfortunate food-poisoning incident — the likes of which no company has ever endured. While there may be no group Chipotle orders for the next several months, your team will be spared the dreaded spaghetti-tower-building project. (Karen, no one wants to do this. Also, Karen, the trick is to sit there chatting the entire time, then turn your table on its end longways just before the timer goes off. Then stick the damn spaghetti to the uppermost portion of the table. Boom, tallest in the room. Can we get back to writing now?)

· Your office organizer will immediately begin trying to assemble teams, and colleagues will make a game of escaping that person via circuitous routes through the cubicle maze you all call home.

Trait Superpower: It’s ok to lean toward being an independent worker — as long as you stretch your muscles and collaborate with others on projects that need lots of brainpower. Of course, writing tends to be a solo project, much like bathing and going to the bathroom. No other writer, designer, or creative planner is going to have the same vision as you, so it can get complicated when it’s time to meld your visions. Your superpower will help you here, because you are open new ideas, and you tend to give most processes, people, and plans a chance.

Authors are a special breed of creative + analytic + sensitive + intelligent. We like to call it eccentric. (It sounds a lot better than ‘crazy.’) Take a good, hard look at all of the traits you possess and the superpowers they give you. You’re basically only lacking a cloak of invisibility and the ability to fly. So there’s nothing stopping you from writing your book — and EVERYTHING pointing you toward getting it done.

It’s time to summon all your superpowers and author a book that’s gonna rock the world. Get outta here. Go write something.