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Show Up and Produce the Words · The Daily Writer

• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Daily Writer, where we share a lesson each day to help you cultivate the habits for writing success.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there is a lot of pressure in the writing and publishing worlds to create the quote unquote right words.
• 0:23
  SPEAKER_00: Words that are moving, effective, emotional, and whatever other superlatives that we want to put on them.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Now, is it important to impact the reader and to make a difference and to create excellent writing?
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, of course it is.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: But you don't get to the gold unless you first dig for it.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Now, this means we have to adopt the discipline that miners have.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: We show up and we dig.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, in writing terms, this means that we actually have to produce the words.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: We have to do the work of writing every day or at least as often as we can.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think a few times a week is kind of like a bare minimum if you want to be taken seriously as a writer.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a lot to be said for creating a set amount of words, even if they're not the quote unquote best words or the most quote unquote refined words.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Many times you'll put something out there that you think is just okay and people love it.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_00: They go nuts for it.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the opposite happens sometimes too.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: You'll put something out there that you think is great and it just kind of flops.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I think this is totally normal because we're not always the best judges of what is excellent work.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: We don't really know sometimes what people are going to respond to.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's up to us to just put consistent writing out there, and people will tell us what is good and what they're responding to.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: For example, the pop star Billie Eilish put out a book recently, and I'm sure she got a massive advance from the publisher.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: Probably at least, I'm sure, half a million dollars, probably a million, maybe even more.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Who knows?
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: But she's obviously very, very successful, very popular.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: And so the publisher, I'm sure, imagined that, hey, this is a great investment.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_00: Let's have Billie Eilish put a book out there because she's beloved all over the world for her music.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: However, the book actually flopped.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, sadly, because I'm I haven't read it, but I'm sure it was a great book.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: The book just was not a hit.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: It kind of flopped in the marketplace.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: Now, my own opinion is that the publisher made the false assumption that her massive number of social media followers would translate into book purchasers, which doesn't really make any sense because Billie Eilish's fans on TikTok and social media, they're not really the book buying crowd.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, nothing against people who love Billie Eilish, but typically people who like her music, um, they're they're really not like the book buying type of people.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: But all that's kind of beside the point to the point of this episode.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I do just want to point that out because it's important to realize that sometimes we don't know what's going to be successful.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know what's going to be a hit or what's not going to be a hit.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: You know, Billie Eilish and her publisher put a book out there thinking it was going to be a massive success, and uh it really wasn't.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: But that's okay because they wouldn't have known that otherwise.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: There was no way to tell that.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: So sometimes you put stuff out there and it it kind of flops.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: But other times you put stuff out there and people just really, really love it and it goes gangbusters.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: So that's really the point of all this, is you don't really know.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: That's why you've got to have a regular gateway to creating something, like a weekly blog post, a daily podcast like this one, or whatever it is.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: And that forces you to create the words, and then you can figure out what is connecting.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know what is going to connect until you actually produce the words.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: That is the risk of what it means to be an artist.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: That is the risk of what it means to be uh to be an actor or a movie director or a screenwriter or a musician or a showrunner for a TV show or um somebody who is a painter.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: All those things involve risk.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: That is the nature of creative work.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_00: Creative work means, by definition, that we're taking a risk because we are creating something not really always knowing if people are going to respond.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: So that's kind of the lesson for today is just have that regular time where you are digging, you're taking that miner's approach.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, we all want that gold, but we do have to dig for it.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: We don't always know when we're gonna strike gold.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: We don't know when we're gonna strike that vein that's gonna be just full of gold and really, really valuable to us.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: But we've got to put in the regular work.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the cool thing is that the more regular work that you put into it, the more lucky you're going to be over time.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So here's your daily question Are you willing to put in the work and do the digging every day so you can extract the eventual gold?
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for listening to today's episode.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: For more, you can visit us at dailywriterlife.com.
• 4:36
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks, and I'll see you tomorrow.