You’ve probably heard this story before about how I used to write articles.
As the story goes, it used to take me two days to write a single article. The process was so painful that I’d write the next article after a month. And as you’d expect, the two days of that month and all the months to follow were miserable.
Then I started up a membership site called 5000bc
5000bc was bare as Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, back in the year 2003. So I promised my members I’d write five articles a week. Of course, you can see the disaster unfolding, can’t you? If I struggled to write an article a day, five articles a week was going to send me right to the cuckoo club.
But something weird happened instead.
I got faster
I found that the more I had to write, the faster I got. Every week, those five articles needed to be written (whether any one read them or not), so I forced myself to write. And I did mention that it got faster, but it also got easier. Hah! Now how on earth would that make sense? But it does, doesn’t it?
If you run from your home to your supermarket, with all your sides jiggling, it’s going to be huff and puff all the way. But do that every day, and then extend it to five times a week, and voilà, the jiggles go away. My jiggles were mostly in my brain. The more I wrote, the faster I became.
And then I went on vacation
On vacation, you take a break. You eat, drink and make merry. And return to what seems to be a writer’s block. But of course, that makes sense too. If you run every day, then don’t run for a month, you’re bound to feel the resistance. So I decided to keep writing.
I didn’t write about work on vacation. I wrote a diary instead. It was interesting to write the diary and most importantly, my writing never stopped.
But would you have to write every single day of your life just to avoid this silly blockage?
Good question. It’s one I asked myself as well. The answer, thankfully, is no. I now go on vacation, and if I don’t write a word, I can come back and get right into writing without missing a beat. So what’s happened? How have things changed?
What’s happened over the years, is that I’ve written so much that it’s now no longer a skill
It’s second nature. Just like you’d go to a foreign country, speak their language and come back to your own country and pick up speaking English once again. So it is with article writing. If you keep at it, you will get better and at some point it will become second nature.
You’ll be able to take chunky breaks.
But for now, you need to write
Write when you’re feeling great.
Write when you’re feeling down.
Write about your work. Or just write about your miserable, freakin’ day.
But write. If you don’t write, resistance creeps in. You hear the jiggle.
You know you’re doomed
Un-doom yourself. Just write.
Breaks are for the jiggly ones!
A guest post by Sean D’Souza. Sean is a writer, marketing guru and expert on sales psychology. To read more articles by Sean, and get a very useful free report on “Why Headlines Fail”, go to PsychoTactics.com
