Level Up As A Writer – WNP 094

 This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, Episode 94: Level Up As A Writer.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner, and today I want to ask you the question, what’s next for you as a writer?

I wasn’t allowed to play video games growing up, but once I got to college, I discovered the world of video games, and I realized that there was this thing called leveling up. In video games, it means if you’re playing sort of an older platform game, that you are progressing to the next level, that you have achieved and beaten all the monsters in your current level, and you are ready to move on to the next level. If you’re playing a type of game where you have a character who gains levels, then every time you achieve a certain achievement, you level up as a character. You get more strength. You get more speed. You get more something, something, something. Hi, Midori… She must be heard.

This is also a prevalent idea in the popular role-playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, which I also got into in college. Once your character goes through enough trials and tribulations, you get to level up your character. That means that your character has been through enough, has experienced enough, has done and seen enough that they get a little bit better at whatever it is they are built to do. Maybe you get an extra point in strength. Maybe you suddenly speak another language. Maybe you get a new feature or two that you can do that you weren’t able to do before. Maybe you do more damage when you attack.

Maybe you’ve noticed that happening in your own life. It might not be as immediate or as immediately gratifying as it is in games, but maybe you realize that today you are better at something than you were 10 years ago. Maybe you’ve leveled up in your cooking skills. Maybe you’ve leveled up in your writing skills. Maybe you’ve leveled up in your weightlifting, or your parenting, or your volleyball spike. Do you ever go back and read something that you wrote 10 years ago, and you just … it’s just really uncomfortable, and you cringe, because you’re so much better now? That’s a good thing. That means you’ve been improving. That means you’ve been leveling up. The important thing about leveling up is that it takes action, and that makes sense. If you want to get better at something, you have to practice. You have to keep doing it. You have to dedicate yourself to it.

What I’m curious about today is what does it mean to level up as a writer? I think this is a hard question for a lot of creatives to answer, because we don’t know a whole lot beyond our own experience, and we often see that the level we’re at is different from the level that other creatives are at. Maybe right now I have a full-time day job and I’m writing in my spare time, and to me the next level looks like maybe leaving my day job and getting paid to write full-time, or if I’m currently self-employed and writing full-time for myself, maybe leveling up is joining The Writers Guild of America and selling TV pilots, writing a blockbuster movie, writing a poignant indie film.

I also want to say that levels are relative. That is to say they’re not hierarchical. They’re not better or worse. They are relative to you, who you are, and what you want as a creator. Writing in Hollywood, being in a writer’s room for a TV show, writing a screenplay, that’s not better or worse than writing your own novel and traditionally publishing or self-publishing your novel. There’s no predetermined ladder of success. It comes down to what do you want? What does it mean for you as a writer to level up?

The first step, which we’ve talked about before in this podcast, is understanding what you want as a creator and determining what success means in relation to what you want. If you don’t know what you want, if you don’t know what’s next for you, that’s okay. I’ve never been one to make plans. Five years ago, if you asked me what I wanted, I would have said, “Oh. I would like to be a VP at the marketing company that I’m currently working at.” Sometimes we don’t know what’s possible. Sometimes we need to just move forward doing what we love and keeping an eye out for opportunities along the way. You can also take a look around you at your local writers community, and by local, I mean online or offline. Talk to another writer. Talk to a mentor. Ask questions. Allow yourself to read, and learn, and imagine, while all the while moving forward with your craft.

Now, again, the key to all of this is action. It’s moving forward, even when you’re anxious, even when you’re uncertain, understanding that you are a writer. Maybe for you your next level up is getting the courage to call yourself a writer with a capital W, but understanding that all of that takes action. I’ve learned a lot over the past couple of years about how much action it takes to live a creative life, but how much of it seems to be passive, how much of it appears to be passive?

I always had this dream of, quote unquote, getting discovered as a writer. In my mind, the way this works is that I would be sitting at my desk in my apartment working on a novel that I had never shown anyone, and all of a sudden I would get an email, or a phone call, or there would be a knock at the door, some kind of call. I would answer that call, and the person, you know, Mr. or Ms. Big Five Publisher, would be standing there. They’d be on the other end of that call. They would say, “Sarah, you have been chosen. You have been selected to be a writer. You’ve been selected to be published.”

I was thinking of it in sort of the same way that sometimes you hear movie stars are discovered. They’re shopping in a mall, or they’re walking through Central Park, and a talent agent sees them, and they get a big modeling contract, and all of a sudden they’re making millions of dollars, and it’s wonderful. That’s not how it works for writers. That is something, embarrassingly, that I have had to learn. It’s not passive. You don’t just sit at your desk waiting. You have to act, and by act I mean you have to create. You have to write. Then you have to take action on what you’ve created and written. You have to finish that work. You have to edit that work. You have to either query agents, or you have to find a way to self-publish your work. You have to, in some way, seek out and work toward publication yourself. Maybe this is through your blog. Maybe this is through a self-published book. Maybe this is through traditional publishing. Maybe this is through a podcast. Maybe it’s through performance.

I read a book several years ago called The 12 Week Year, by Brian P. Moran. In that book, he said something that stuck with me. He said, “If you want something you don’t currently have, you need to do something you’re not currently doing.” Again, notice the emphasis on action. “If you want something you don’t currently have, you need to do something you’re not currently doing.” It’s about taking action. What is it that you don’t currently have, and what is it you need to do to obtain that that you’re maybe not currently doing? What is that next level, and what is it that you need to have or to do in order to get there?

Again, a lot of the time, we simply don’t know what we don’t know. We don’t know what our options are. We don’t know what the possibilities are, which is why I think a lot of it comes down to continuing every day, or as many days as you can manage, to do the work that you love, because there’s a trap. Well, there’s several traps that we can fall into. One of those traps is standing still and assuming that success will come to us, not taking action. Another one of those traps is the difference between discerning what’s necessary and what is assumed. Here’s what I mean by that.

I conducted a survey probably a little over a year ago of a lot of indie podcasters. If you’re listening to this episode, maybe you were a part of that survey. If so, thank you. But in conducting this survey and in asking the questions that I asked, I learned that a lot of creators base their next up level on assumption, and this isn’t anyone’s fault. This is not your fault, because, again, often/usually we don’t know what we don’t know. Here’s a concrete example of what I mean.

One of the questions I asked in my survey was what’s holding you back from the success that you want? You’d be surprised at the number of people who responded, “I haven’t won the lottery yet,” or, “I don’t have a $50,000 grant.” I can guarantee you that every single person who has ever gained creative success has not won the lottery, or more realistically, every single person who’s ever experienced creative success has not received a grant. This is one of the assumptions that I’m talking about, this assumption that in order to level up, in order to find the success that you’re looking for, in order to reach the next level as a writer, you need some unfathomably large amount of money.

A lot of people fall into this trap, and so they put up a roadblock, and they make a connection in their minds that they cannot level up until this need, this assumed need, is met. They follow this assumption that in order to be a successful creator, I must follow a very rigid path, and this rigid path consists of me winning a lottery, quitting my job, and finally having time to write, or create, or podcast all day, so that I can launch or publish my work. Sure. However unrealistic, that is one path, but what strikes me is that so many people seem to think of that as the path, the only path, the only way they will ever even begin to realize their creative dreams.

I think a lot of this assumption, a lot of this unreasonable thinking comes from the fact that we don’t know. It’s not always made clear to us, it’s not always transparent how to get from point a to point B, how to get from point A, which is me writing for 15 minutes over my lunch break every day, to point B, which is me being a published novelist, and so we assume that between point A and point B something magical must happen. We win the lottery. That publisher comes and knocks on our door and asks, “Hello, Sarah. Do you maybe have a drawer of unfinished and unpublished novels that you’ve never let anyone see?”

What is it you think you need? What is it that you are assuming that you need? What is crucial, or what do you believe is crucial for you to have before you can level up as a writer? Is it to finish whatever it is you’re currently working on, your short story, a poem, the first rough draft of your novel? Is it a mentorship? Is it attending a conference? Is it actually sitting down and prioritizing writing in your schedule? Is it a measure of confidence that you’d like to work on earning? Is it just that you’re terrified to query an agent, and you just need to sit down and do that or submit your story to a publisher, or a magazine, or a contest? Here’s the question. Do you actually need these things? Do you actually need to attend that conference to be a successful writer, or is that something that you’re assuming? What assumptions are holding you back? What traps are you setting for yourself and then falling into? What is it you’re not currently doing that you need to start doing?

Here’s the second trap that we fall into. Some things look and feel like progress, like moving forward, like taking action, but they’re not. This is a trap I fall into all the time. It comes down to understanding your true work. I feel like this could be a podcast episode in and of itself. I started thinking about the concept of true work earlier this year, because I realized that a lot of the work I was doing was not meaningful. It was not moving me forward in the way that I needed to move forward. It was simply treading water or marking time. I was losing time and energy to what was essentially busy work. What does this look like for us as writers and creators?

This is maybe when I have a two hour chunk of time set aside on a Saturday morning specifically for writing, and instead, I use it to respond to emails, instead, I use it to adjust my Facebook author page, instead, I use it to scroll through Twitter for two hours, instead, I use it to update the homepage of my website, instead, I use it to adjust the font of my current work in progress. Now, these are all things that, yes, at some point we probably need to do, but are they our true work? Are they the tasks that will help us actually level up as a writer? Are they going to get us to where we want to be, or are they simply a way for us to further procrastinate?

I did this yesterday, actually. I had some time set aside for creative writing, I’m working on Girl In Space Season Two. I had the document pulled up, and I had my little note cards in front of me with my ideas on them. What did I do? I opened up Canva, and I began recreating the cover images for old Write Now Podcast episodes, so that I could post them to Instagram and Pinterest. Okay. Is that something that needs to get done? Not really. Did it feel like I was getting things accomplished? Yeah. I got 50 images redesigned, but what is that going to do for me in leveling up as a writer? Was I working on busywork, or was I working on my true work, the work that will define me as a creator, the work in which my legacy will live on, the work that I actually need to be doing? This is a trap that is very easy for me personally to fall into.

I grew up in the public school system and then worked in an office environment for the first more than a decade of my career. I have been trained to look busy. I have been trained to use the hours between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM to do stuff. More often than not, the stuff that I have been expected to do has not been meaningful. I’m wondering if this is maybe true for you as well. We’ve been taught to fill up our time with busy tasks. We have not been taught to focus. We have not been taught the difference between busy work and our true work, and maybe we haven’t even ever been given permission to work on what it is that is our true work.

I’m used to giving precedence to my busy work. That’s what my life was for the first 20 or 30 years. Got to get this busy work done, so that I can go work on my novel. Got to do my chemistry homework, so that I can work on my writing. Somehow over the years my true work, my creative writing, became hardwired into my brain as an afterthought. I was told that that was the dessert, but I had to finish my dinner first, dinner being the busy work that I, quote unquote, had to get done, my true work being the dessert that I could enjoy maybe as a treat afterward. We will only level up as writers by taking action and moving forward with our true work, but, again, there are so many traps that get in the way.

Another trap is self-sabotage. This is when we, either consciously or unconsciously, so maybe you decide to do it or maybe it is just something you’re doing on autopilot, but you keep yourself from leveling up. This is what I’m doing. I’m sabotaging myself. When I spend two hours creating Pinterest images for podcast episodes that I published five years ago, instead of working on the project that I need to finish, I am sabotaging myself. Do you know why? Do you know why we do this? Because growth, and learning, and leveling up are uncomfortable. They’re kind of scary. That’s right. It’s such a weird paradox. Leveling up is our dream, but it’s also mildly terrifying.

Here’s the question I want you to ask when you realize that you are falling into these traps, when you realize that you might just be self-sabotaging. That question is what are you getting out of not leveling up? Maybe a feeling of safety, a feeling of comfort, the feeling that you’re not risking anything. Feeling safe and feeling comfortable, it’s a great feeling, but unfortunately, your next level is going to be just outside of your comfort zone. Like Brian P. Moran said earlier, “If you want something you don’t currently have, you need to do something you are not currently doing.” What do you need to let go of, and do you even want to let go of it? Is leveling up as a writer worth it?

Maybe the comfort, and safety, maybe the superiority that you feel for being a big fish in a small pond, maybe that feels better than it will feel to publish your novel. Maybe your goal isn’t to publish your novel. Maybe your goal is to feel good, and safe, and comfortable. But I think that if you are listening to this podcast, despite the siren song of comfort and safety, that’s not really what you want. I think what you want is to write, and to create, and to feel fulfilled and joyful in that writing and in that creating.

I encourage you to read. I encourage you to learn. I encourage you to imagine. I encourage you to ask questions and to think about all the questions you don’t know to ask. I encourage you to take action every single day, because all of those tiny, little steps, they add up over time. I know it’s slow, and I know it’s frustrating. I know this, but it works. What action do you need to take? What risk do you need to take? What momentary comfort do you need to sacrifice? What bounds of safety are you willing to step out of? What is it you need to do to level up as a writer?

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Special thanks for this week’s episode go out to TJ Bricke, Lori, Tiffany Joyner, Regina Calabrese, Leslie Madsen, Susan Geiger, Amanda L. Dickson, Julian Vincent Thornburgh, Michael Beckwith, Amanda King, Sean Locke, Sarah Lauzon, Leslie Duncan, and Ricardo. Thank you all so, so much for your generosity and for making this show available for all writers all over the world.

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I mentioned this a couple episodes ago, but I have a free e-book available for you. It’s called 10 Harmful Creativity Myths, and it’s a free, 50-page ebook that I wrote and published myself that you can download for free. All you do to obtain your own copy is to go to sarahwerner.com/10myths. That’s 1-0-M-Y-T-H-S, all one word. I created that ebook in conjunction with Episode 92 of the Write Now Podcast, which is also called 10 Harmful Creativity Myths. I don’t know. It was a lot of fun to create. It was really, really fun to go through some of these myths and perceptions that we have about creative writing and creativity in general and smash them. Please do snag your copy of that, if you would like it.

With that, this has been Episode 94 of the Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise, to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner, and I’m going to work today on leveling up.

[Closing music.]