Life as a Writer: How to Build a Writing Lifestyle
Life as a Writer: How to Build a Writing Lifestyle This week, we’re going to be talking about a subject that we probably don’t talk about enough: How do you actually build a life as a writer? Sure, it would be easy if all you had to do was write, if you didn’t have a day job, if you didn’t have friends, if you didn’t have work, if you didn’t have vacation, if you didn’t have family, if you didn’t have hobbies… But the truth is that the magical future we all dream of where every element of our lives just effortlessly supports our writing really never comes. Even for hugely successful writers, there remain many conflicting needs pulling at our attention: meetings, productions, multiple projects that we’re juggling, family and experiences. We need these things. If we lived in a total solitude where all we did was write, it would be really hard to come up with interesting ideas for a film or a TV show. Our ideas grow out of our relationships, friendships, experiences, and even out of our frustrations and problems. At the same time, it can be extremely challenging to make room for your writing lifestyle. How do you make room for your writing lifestyle when your life is already over-full? How do you make room for your passion when you have so many responsibilities? How do you break through the inertia when you already don’t have enough time to get all the things you need to get done? How do you start an overwhelming passion project in the midst of all that? That’s what we’re going to be talking about in this podcast. Where do you start? It’s a truth about human nature that we tend to prioritize whatever is in front of us. Whatever message you send to your subconscious mind when you first get out of bed, it’s going to kind of take that as super important. So, if you roll out of bed and the first thing you say to yourself is, “I gotta check my email,” your subconscious mind says, “Okay, got it. That makes sense. Emails are really important. Let’s keep focused on email.” Somehow that email checking and that anxiety that you woke up with rolls into a whole day. You never get out of your email and you never do that important thing that you really wanted to do. As opposed to thinking “Well, what’s the big dream?” and focusing your life around that. Without a little help, your subconscious mind is just going to accept “Okay, whatever you’re showing me is probably what I actually need to focus on.” To change this on the simplest level, and start prioritizing our writing, we need to establish a pattern that consistently shows our subconscious mind what really matters to us. That starts by showing our conscious mind what really matters to us because often, we don’t actually take time to consciously think about it. In a way, many of us are passive main characters in the journey of our own life. It gets really hard to root for passive main characters. It becomes really hard to feel structure for passive main characters. It feels really easy to become just as stuck about them as they are about ourselves. If you want to actually achieve your dreams, then that begins with doing the hard work and asking, “What matters to me? What actually matters most?” You’ve got to do some meditation and ask yourself, “What is the most important thing in my life?” That doesn’t preclude all the other things that matter to you. You don’t have to be a narcissist or a megalomaniac to become a great writer, but everybody needs a dream. If your dream isn’t writing, then find one that is your dream. But if your dream is writing, then it’s important to remember that you must serve your own dream in order to serve all the other things that are important in your life.