How Writers Self-Sabotage And How To Fix It

Self-Sabotaging Your Writing

Writing is pretty straightforward. Sure, there are complexities and you aren’t guaranteed success. But it remains an activity with very little barrier to entry.

Most people who try to become successful writers fail. They don’t finish projects, they don’t make money, they aren’t happy or they otherwise mess up somewhere along the line.

…Even though you can write so long as you have a computer and a word processor and the desire to put work out there.

There are many reasons for this, but most failures with writing occur because people self-sabotage.

In this article, I’ll give you the most common ways writers self-sabotage and then I’ll give the fixes for each of them; all in a few hundred words.

Not Writing At All

The biggest act of self-sabotage you can make as far as writing goes is to not write at all. Many “writers” don’t write. Here are some quick rules for writing:

• You need to spend time writing. No excuses.
• There’s no “getting in the mood.” Sit and write. It doesn’t matter if you feel like it.
• When you start writing, it doesn’t matter if it’s rubbish or not. You can throw it away later.
• Writer’s block is a mental one. It doesn’t exist. Sit and write.

The general theme of this section is “sit and write.” You’ll find 90% of your problems go away if you just do the above.

There’s an anxiety associated with starting any project. It will go once you start. If you find yourself in the middle of something and unsure where to go, just keep going. You’ll find your rhythm again.

Perfectionism

There’s no such thing as perfect writing. Shakespeare and Dickens have critics and morons on Amazon review comments who’ll tell you their words are rubbish. If they’re victims, then you will be too.

Perfectionism in writing is a total waste of time.

Perfectionism in most things is a waste of time, because you are a terrible judge of the value of your work.

Here’s a quick working cure for your writing perfectionism:

1. Write your stuff quickly and to the best of your ability
2. Put it on the market (or otherwise out in the world)
3. (Remember not to take criticism personally)
4. Let the market/audience decide what’s good/bad about your work
5. Do better next time based on real world feedback

That’s all there is to curing perfectionism. You might get a critic. You might get people say, “your editing sucks!” Finally, you might get told, “This isn’t what we’re looking for.”

But you know what?

There’s always a next time, and you can do better. Nobody hits the jackpot on their first go.

Writing The Wrong Stuff

Look, if you want your stuff to sit on a computer or in your desk drawer forever, then write what you want. If you want people to read your work, much less pay for it, then you need to concentrate on writing things that’ll bring you success.

This isn’t “selling out.”

You have two choices;

1. Work for a living doing a job you hate and write as a hobby (and in turn never get to be as good as you could have been)
2. Write stuff that’ll allow you to write stuff all day every day commercially speaking

For most of my writing career, I’ve worked with a lot of solo entrepreneurs who are trying to build online businesses. It’s a great field to get into and it’ll be even better in the future.

But a lot of these guys write the wrong things.

Nobody needs another carbon-copy “How to be a MAN!” blog.

Nobody wants to read another article about politics.

When it comes to the fiction writers among you, there are a whole bunch of people that are writing for weird niche political reasons. “I’m writing transgender sci-fi and the selling point is that there are no traditional genders in the WeirdWorld Saga.”

Yeah… that’s probably not a selling point. There’s nothing wrong with niche fiction unless you expect it to sell like not-niche fiction.

There’s nothing that says, “Self-Sabotage” quite like focusing on projects that’ll never amount to anything for some obscure philosophical reasoning. If you want to help people, become successful first.

Being Defined By Your Writing

I’ve seen so many people fall into weird niches – and the aforementioned political trends – because they got into the weird habit of writing a role, playing the role and then living a role.

Guys that wrote about survivalism going full nutcase and thinking the Government was tapping their phones because they wrote a blog post about Snowden.

Or guys that write in the dating market turning into bitter recluses.

Then there’s the people that write about business opportunities that “can’t associate with regular people” and literally talk like they’re the stooge in an MLM TV advert.

Finally, there are the countless people who seem to think of writing as a lifestyle thing where you have to go to coffee shops and walk around with a notepad everywhere like a dork… or people that say, “If you want to be a copywriter, you’re going to be an alcoholic.”

I don’t know how much of that is naïve people, jokers and liars, but this isn’t really appropriate.

If you want to be a writer, you type words onto a screen and then when you’re done you switch the PC off and go do something else.

If you try and become a caricature, then you’ll probably find it’s miserable.

Rewriting

People spend far too much time rewriting. I could go on about this like I have done above, but it’s pretty much the same as the perfectionist section above.

In discussions with other writers, I’ve heard stuff like, “I’m on draft ten” or “I use the first draft to get my thoughts down, second draft to get the structure, third to get the vocabulary and fourth to create a rough draft of the entire thing.”

What?

That’s absurd. It’s a waste of time. You should try and write in as few drafts as possible, and you don’t get money or mystical spiritual brownie points for having as many useless drafts as possible.

If in doubt, write one draft, then repeat the process mentioned above:

1. Write your stuff quickly and to the best of your ability
2. Put it on the market (or otherwise out in the world)
3. (Remember not to take criticism personally)
4. Let the market/audience decide what’s good/bad about your work
5. Do better next time based on real world feedback

Final Thoughts

Alright, now I’ve killed all of your excuses, you can go and write.

Remember, your job as a writer is to put words down. Your audience decide whether those words are good enough. If the audience decide you need to correct your path, then great. Do that. But you don’t decide when you’re rubbish. They do.

And an audience can only decide on your work if you put it out there.

That means you need to finish what you start.

And that means that you need to get started.

Now’s a good time.