Don’t finish your book too early

In your head.

That’s is where life is.

It’s what we say.

We decide the narrative. We tell the story.

Good or bad.

Kind or hateful.

Love or hate.

Whatever opposites you want.

Fear or bravery.

Hiding or being open.

There are a million shades of grey not just the black and white options.

Whatever narrative you create inside your head, remember it’s you who creates it and controls it.

The story is ours and we get to write every line of every chapter, yet we often allow others to be the editors of our story.

Write it yourself, tell it as you want it, and the good news is you can always re-write the story, add another chapter, change the plot, even re-write a scene, change the characters. It’s completely the author’s choice.

However at the end of our story, the only thing we’ll regret is we didn’t keep writing more chapters.

Don’t get to the end of your book to early in life and settle for the book being done because it’s easy.

Writing for the bin

My mate Doug runs fab workshops, exploring different themes using art. He uses a warm-up exercise, as most people are fearful of art, that he titles ‘drawing for the bin’.

Essentially, if you remove the pressure so that you are just drawing with no intention of sharing or keeping, just screwing up the paper and throwing it in the bin, you relax and after several sheets of paper, you’ve warmed up and are then able to do something better.

The same applies to many things, including writing.

This is my 5th draft blog in the last 45 minutes, I was stuck with something to write, I started to feel the pressure, so I just wrote, and then opened another blank screen and wrote again and again.

5 times over until I wrote this. Writing without the pressure of sharing it, makes it easy. Doing it several times in a row warms you up.

Pressure inhibits and is removed when you stop thinking and just start without an expected outcome.