Dear Writer, You Need to Quit (QuitBooks for Writers, #1)

by Becca Syme

Write Better-Faster

Eventually, they have to face their shadow and decide to be the best version of themself.

most people who attempt adult behavioral change don’t assimilate it.

Someone asks you a question, you accept the premise of the question.

In making a choice, you’ve accepted the premise that you need to eat dinner at all. Maybe you’re not hungry.

your best work is going to come when you edit the page in your head, instead of on paper or on the screen.

your productivity (your success) is a system. It’s made up of your environment, your personality, your platform, your resources, and your patterns.

This is why the “magic pill” philosophy doesn’t work. Because every system is complex and the process of assimilating a new one is complicated and takes a lot of time. Not to mention, it may cause more problems than it solves.

Keystone habits are similar.

keystone habits are little tweaks that bring a broken or malfunctioning system into alignment and allow it to bear weight again.

As a writer, you don’t get stuck in a book because you’re stupid. You get stuck in a book because there’s something off in your system.

Your life is a complicated set of factors, any of which could be the reason for your success or failure.

When you press the start button on your life system (at birth), you create inertia with the choices you make. Every choice. You create brain patterns whose job is to keep that system in motion. This is why so much of therapy goes back to childhood, because it’s important to look at when your psychological inertia was formed. Without any outside force acting on your system, it will stay the same. But with too many different forces acting on your system, it will push back on all of them, to remain in motion.

So, when you set new goals, you’re standing up against a river of past choices, intended to help re-inforce your habits. When you spread your goals too widely, you take an already small amount of resistance (capacity to build new riverbeds) and try to spread it across different rivers. It is easily overcome, trying to hold up that rushing water.

The first step is always acceptance.

Second, once you’ve accepted, then prioritize.

Third—and this is hard, I know—but pick the top priority only, and take some steps to strategically and intentionally impact that one big thing. Don’t overhaul the system, especially not at first. Take action to change the most important thing, and don’t let yourself back down from that.

out. If, instead, you spend all your pennies in one direction, you get farther, faster.

This is why you pick one thing and focus your attention on it. Inertia has a harder time pushing back against one targeted strike than it does against many splintered attempts.

Their system is not magic. Their alignment is magic. The way their system lines up with their brain, their goals, and their capacity is the magic thing.

Because writing a “good” book means different things to different people.

Because some people need to think a lot in order to write a book, and the common productivity myth that tells people “just stop thinking and write” doesn’t actually help those people write faster. It actively stalls them.

course, when it doesn’t work, they think, there’s clearly something wrong with me instead of questioning the very premise of what the productivity guru told them.

The wrong thing might be: your assumption about the similarity between your brain and the productivity guru’s brain; your assumption about what you should be capable of; your assumption about being a career author; your assumption about… you get the idea?

The system isn’t magic. The alignment is magic.

What she didn’t recognize in herself was that she had a particular need for emotional stability that overwhelmed everything else about her personality. No matter what she tried, any time she was in the middle of transition or instability, her writing would freeze.

There was nothing to be done about it. No amount of “just work harder” or “just ignore what’s going on” would work for her, because she’s wired to be responsive and impacted by the people around her in a way that her friends weren’t. So she seemed “wrong” to herself, when she compared herself to them.

This isn’t about a combination of Strengths®, it’s about what she valued the most, which is a different metric than success. To the women in her friend group, it was pace—drive. To Joan, it was peace—stability. Not everyone has the same capacity to thrive in chaos.

To assume that one set of goals is the best for everyone is to not understand the human brain. Alignment is key. The reason I encourage you to quit trying to be like everyone else is because what works for other people won’t work for you.

Alignment. Is. Magic.

Sometimes, the things you look forward to the most are merely the result of repetition over time. Have you ever questioned the premise of whether or not you need coffee in the morning?

How much of your life is ruled by your default choices?

The good news is, with some work, your brain is re-programmable.

Because resistance is conflict, which causes tension, strife, frustration, consternation.

Yet in our own lives, we reject conflict instead of embracing it for what it can offer us, learning what we can, releasing our emotions, and getting the work done.

Accepting that the pain is unavoidable will help your brain move through it. Welcoming pain takes away some of its power. And over time, the more acceptance you practice, the easier it will get to move past the “writing isn’t fun” moments.

You can start noticing when your unrealistic expectations are producing problems, and you can start re-setting your expectations.

Because it’s not the “hardness” of writing that’s the problem, it’s the expectation.

The next best thing to “easy” is a manageable problem.

And what she’s bad at, frankly, I don’t care.

Because her strengths are more important than her weaknesses.

In order to stand out, you have to stand out. Which means that you have to be better than everyone else at something. Something. But not everything. Being memorable quite literally means that you did something so well or so completely or so fascinatingly that people remember you.

So even in being palatable enough to get readers to complete books, you have to be at the top of your game. And if you want to be at the top of a genre or an industry, you really have to know how to stand out. The key here is: this is not about getting rid of your weaknesses. You are not a show dog. No one is going to give you a medal because you have no weaknesses. No. Readers have to be compelled all the way through your books (because there are a million other things vying for their attention, and you are lucky to get their eyeballs). That means you have to up your game. It means you have to focus on your strengths, and not on your weaknesses.

The better-faster theory is based on the idea that, with the least resistance and the most capacity, you will have your greatest results.

When your neurons fire, they create the equivalent of circuits in your brain. When you repeat an action you’ve repeated before, those circuits get reinforced, until the action

becomes a pattern, and the pattern becomes a circuit. This is why (as we discussed earlier) adult behavioral change is so difficult. Because you have to un-program a lot of circuitry in order to change your instinctive actions and thoughts.

Because we are all different, and our lives are systems, and every single factor in our life impacts the system.

Our ability to tell stories from data. Tell your own.

Because in the “bored silence”, our creative brains are working.1 In fact, certain Strengths® need more of this bored silence to work more effectively, and one of the unfortunate byproducts of a focus on “productivity” (like all minutes are equally up for grabs) is that we often try to pull those “bored silence” times out of the schedule.

Brian had Strengths® that lent themselves to deep thinking,