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Determine Your Author Success! Forget Hemingway and Twain – Find You!
When we read about an author we admire, we say to ourselves, “This is how they do it. This is how they write. This is how they research. This is how they edit. This is how they market. It must be the right way.” And then we follow their lead.
A fiction writer may look at Hemingway’s success and believe that if she wrote like Hemingway, she too would be that successful. Or, if she adopted Twain’s habits, she too would be prolific.
Hemingway wrote standing up, saying that “writing and travel broaden your ass if not your mind and I like to write standing up.” Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll all wrote standing up as well, and the seven foot tall Thomas Wolfe used the top of his refrigerator as a writing desk. However, both Twain and Truman Capote wrote lying down, Capote bragging that he perceived himself “a completely horizontal author”.
Both fiction and non-fiction authors have their claims about substances helping or destroying their writing quality and quantity. Twain, who was well known for both his fiction and non-fiction work, wrote daily, smoking 40 cigars. “A bad writing day is when I ran out of cigars before I got that last brilliant thought.” Hemingway started drinking at two in the afternoon and we know how that turned out.
We look to our writing heroes for the perfect number of words an author should write in a day. George Bernard Shaw wrote 1000 words per day, Thomas Wolfe 10,000 and Hemingway a mere 500.
Writing style, habits, surroundings, interactions with others and decisions about process all affect our success. As an author, you must ask yourself – whose way of writing are you paying attention to? The only answer should be – your own. The person you should be paying attention to is you.
When authors get stuck on a book writing project, they may be receiving too much advice from too many people and none of it is working for them. An author needs to respect her own style and inner Author Personality so that she can move forward in this adventure with speed and serenity.
Therefore the first step to success as an author is to identify your own Author Personality. By knowing your specific writing preferences, you can avoid frustration and delay as you move through the steps of the Book Project Model (obsess, clarify, research, chunk or outline, write, market, edit, produce, market, repurpose and reposition).
To determine your Author Personality, consider these four distinctions:
1. Are you an introvert or an extravert?
2. Are you pressure-prompted or pleasure-prompted?
3. Are you a linear or a lateral thinker?
4. Are you an early bird or night owl?
Each of these questions affects, to a lesser or greater degree, your success in the different steps of a book writing project. These are four different and separate questions. They do not create an amalgamated model. Knowing even the answer to one of the four will set you free in some ways to be a successful author.
This is the first chapter of my book, Hemingway or Twain? Unleashing Your Author Personality available on Amazon and Kindle. Learn about this model and two others: the Book Project Model and the Milking Stool model. In combination with the Author Personality, you can will learn how to save pain, time and money while you complete and market your non-fiction book!
Author Personality Question #1: Are you an Extrovert or an Introvert?
Stuck with not moving ahead on your writing project? Too much advice from too many people – and none of it works for you?
The first step to success as an author is to identify your author personality. By knowing your author personality you can save yourself pain and frustration as you move through the research/write/market/produce/repurpose cycles of a writing project.
There are several questions to ask yourself to determine your author personality. Each of these questions affects, to a lesser or greater degree, your success in the different cycles of a writing project. Consider #1: Are you an extrovert or an introvert?
If you are a mid-to-extreme extrovert, you may find that locking yourself away to work on a writing project is not only difficult, but impossible. You need PEOPLE to discuss your ideas with, PEOPLE around you in your environment, PEOPLE interrupting you frequently before you start daydreaming about other projects, PEOPLE to take your mind off the work, and PEOPLE to reconnect you to your content.
If you are a mid-to-extreme introvert, you avoid people so they won’t distract you from your work and so you can concentrate. Period.
If you have heard about authors who go away to where there is no phone, internet or contact with humans for weeks at a time to write, you can be sure that if they have successful writing, they are an introvert. Extroverts begin to get stir crazy after the first four hours, and search out the closest Starbucks within the first 24 hours to regain their social sanity. Escaping to the woods to write is not a successful strategy for extroverts.
Keys for writing success for extroverts:
1. Minimize the aloneness of writing by scheduling social time into your day so you know how long you ‘still have to work’ before you can take a break and communicate with another human. Acknowledge your author personality – the goal is to get the project done, not to get it done a certain way.
2. Work in coffee shops and restaurants where there are humans about you, but not necessarily ‘with’ you. Pay attention to where you are the most productive: is it an upfront window seat where you see people walk by or a back table space that is quieter?
3. Frequently get feedback on your ideas from colleagues. Pick up the phone, call by Skype or meet in person to verbalize an idea that you are trying to flesh out. Extroverts need an opportunity to bounce ideas around more so than introverts.
4. Writing is an alone activity and extreme extroverts will be easily distracted not only by other humans, but by other tasks. Set up an environment where only your current writing materials surround you. Box up all other material that you won’t be focusing on until after the writing project is done, label the boxes and put them in another room, in the basement, or even in storage.
Keys for writing success for introverts:
Most information on writing is for the introvert author personality. Writing itself is a solitary role that introverts are more comfortable with than extroverts. But think about these ideas:
1. Identify your best writing times – as an introvert you may be driven to write long hours and some of those hours may be more productive than others. Pay attention to these swings in productivity and energy so you know when you are in a declining return and better served by resting or doing other tasks.
2. Be willing to tell others that when you are writing you need to be left undisturbed. If you don’t live alone, this may require some tough conversations to identify a quiet place where you can work. Consider going away to be alone to work if you can’t find the quiet and undistracted space at home, even if it is at the library for a few serene hours.
Distraction is a powerful obstacle to completing a writing project. Recognize your author personality and put into place the guidelines you need to succeed.