49: 5 Steps to Fight Author Fade

Today we're going to tackle a delicate

subject which I have dubbed author fade, what is author

fade? How do you recognize it? And how do you avoid it? Or

recover from it? These questions and more in Episode 49 of

writing pursuits. Welcome to the writing pursuits podcast where

authors like you discuss writing craft, author, life and book

marketing strategies. I'm your host Kathrese. McKee. I own

writing pursuits and write and produce the weekly newsletter

writing pursuits tips for authors. In addition, I am a

speculative fiction author. Writing pursuits is for authors

who drink too much coffee, endure judgemental looks from

their furry writing, convenience and struggle for words. If you

are a writer seeking encouragement, information and

inspiration, this podcast is for you. Let's get to it. Hey,

writing precedes authors. Welcome back to the podcast. For

those of you who are new, I want to extend a special welcome. My

name is Kathrese. McKee. And I'm glad you're here, you may have

guessed that this topic concerns a personal struggle of mine. And

I'm gonna get a little preachy, but remember that I'm kind of

preaching to myself. Recently, I have been fighting against what

is known as pod fade, which is defined by the Urban Dictionary

in this way, when a podcast begins putting out episodes more

and more sporadically, and at greater intervals, typically

begins with only one episode missed. But if a podcast isn't

careful, it can compound sometimes as severely as one

podcast every other month, pod fade, often leads to podcast

death. So this gave me the idea for discussing author fade,

which is also something I struggle with. I think there's a

pattern here, we can define author fade, as an indefinite

pause in writing activity, author fade often leads to

writing death, obviously, you don't die. But as a writer, your

work stops. So it's writing death. How do you recognize

author fade, I'm not talking about everyone you've ever met,

who when you tell them your writing, they'll tell you they

helped to write a book someday, you know, the typical would be

author begins, but they never finished their first story. So

I'm not talking to those of you who've completed a book

published or not, you're still in an elite group. But I want

you to know that many serious mature writers experience author

fade, this sorts of missing a scheduled day of writing, and

then it becomes a week and then it becomes a month, which turns

into a year of not writing maybe years of not writing, author

fade can begin at any time. Even after an author has published

several books. Remember I said this was a personal topic for

me, the author simply fades away, they don't publish, they

stop sitting down to write, they're filled with regret, be

alert to the symptoms and they kind of go like this author fade

is not usually intentional. It generally is accompanied by

loads of guilt. Author fade often involves false promises. I

will start again tomorrow or next year or when the kids get a

little older. I've heard all those from my clients. common

excuses are, I don't have the time to write. Nobody's going to

read my work anyway. Or I'm not good at spelling and grammar or

my family doesn't understand or support my writing. They haven't

read even one of my books, and they think my writing is just a

hobby. Well, I'm gonna preach a little bit, monitor yourself

talk. Let's stop making Writing Excuses. Life is what it is. Set

aside the excuses and the things you tell yourself. The lies you

tell yourself. If you catch yourself whining, or making

Writing Excuses. You need to stop and reframe the words

you're using about yourself and to yourself, your self talk can

be toxic. So you must control what you tell yourself. I don't

have the time to write needs to become I can find the time to

write. Reframe, rephrase what you're telling yourself. Nobody

is going to read my work anyway, should become something like I

for my work. I'm not good at spelling and grammar because I

can work with an editor to take care of the nitty gritty

details. Hey guys, so that's why I'm here. I'm an editor. You can

turn over your terrible spelling and grammar to me, and we can

work through it. And finally, my family doesn't understand or

support my writing. And that's okay. Because that's a common

experience among creatives. Just tell yourself that it is okay

that they don't understand it.

It is okay that they don't support your writing. You just

need to do what you need to do. Massive Action is not the best

way for most people to overcome author fe, that's another thing

we need to accept. And every work life, some urgency must

fall, there is a time, usually at the end of a project when you

have to push yourself. You know, like when I was a programmer,

somehow, the week before a new change went in to the software

app. Man, I'm telling you, the programming team would get three

times the usual amount of work done. It's just a fact of life,

there's a time to push, but you cannot push all the time.

Writing books is a marathon especially if you intend to

write books from now on, you will burn out if you take

massive action all the time. And if you take massive action

24/7 365 Inevitably the other shoe is going to drop, your

relationships will suffer, your health will suffer. You'll learn

to hate writing, which is like the worst consequence of all,

that's terrible. Also, stop comparing yourself. This is the

last thing also stop comparing your results to others results.

You don't know their life, you have no idea what is going on

there. It is useless to compare your beginning with someone

else's middle, and comparison kills writing motivation.

Instead, we're going to look at five things you can do to avoid

or overcome author fade. And those are vision, habits,

increments, measurement, and accountability. Use those things

to pace yourself and keep moving forward. So the first step is

vision. Create an author mission statement. If you don't already

have an author mission statement. Then you need to

write one today, like create one right away. Vision combined self

knowledge, dreams, your goals, your motivations. And a lot of

people set out on the writing road without figuring out why

they want to write or where they hope to end up. If you don't

understand your why your energy is going to dry up. But if you

take time to figure out your reasons why and write them down,

then you can turn your dreams into goals and stay motivated.

You need to know why you're writing. Who do you hope to

touch with your work? Who will benefit from all of your

efforts? What do you hope to accomplish? How do you see

yourself? Or where do you see yourself in five years,

visualize those things and put it into your author mission

statement. Your heart needs to be involved. You need a an

emotional connection to your writing goals. No matter what

you write. I don't care if you're writing fiction or

nonfiction, epic novels, ghost writing articles, blog posts or

even tweets, you will be more likely to succeed if you know

your reason why, and have a heartfelt reason for putting

yourself through the ordeal. Because Writing is hard work. So

write your vision down. Your written vision statements will

help you remember your reasons why put them in a place where

you can review them often. And feel free to modify them as you

gain experience. visions don't stay the same, they will change

over time. But if you have a written down, then you have a

place to start vision is the key to long term motivation and to

moving forward. So think about where you want to be in five

years in the future. And then kind of work back to four years

to three years, two years, one year to the next month. And then

set reasonable actionable goals for what you need to do next.

The next step or prong of attack is habits create strong habits

to combat author fade if you want to create good writing

habits and you need to create a system to support them. I love

the book atomic habits by James clear clear writes about the

Four Laws of behavior change, and they are make it obvious,

make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying,

obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. Let's take a single

example. If you want to form a daily journaling habit, then set

up a system to make that happen. To make journaling obvious, you

might set out your pen and notebook where you drink your

morning coffee. It's obvious it's right there. That's where

you're going to write every day. Then schedule 15 minutes every

day with a reminder on your phone to do it. Then keep the

appointment with yourself. Those appointments with yourself are

as important as every other appointment you make. Maybe more

important to make your new habit attractive. Maybe you can get a

beautiful new notebook and a pen to use or find an app you enjoy

using make it attractive

For yourself, make it enjoyable. Okay, to make journaling easy,

limit yourself by time or space, this seems counterintuitive. But

if you know journaling will take no more than 15 minutes, or

you're only going to write a single page of words every day,

then you're more likely to succeed, you can do anything for

15 minutes, right? By limiting that amount of time or space,

you're telling yourself, hey, this is easy, I can do this. Now

you have a doable task. And tomorrow, you'll know you can do

it. And the next day and the next, meet your tiny atomic

goal. And stop, rinse and repeat. That's how a new habit

is formed. To make it satisfying, keep score in some

way more about that in a minute. This habit forming process works

with other writing tasks to schedule the time show up, limit

yourself by time or word count, and keep score. And of course,

if you're feeling great about what you're doing continue, but

on the days when you don't feel so great about it. By limiting

your time or your space, you make it doable, and you know,

you can do it and you sit down and make yourself do that little

short thing. The tiny atomic goals met. For bigger, more

complicated writing projects, you're going to need more than

habit to avoid, author fade. And that's where increments come in.

You need vision. First, you must commit to forming habits, but

habits and goals need to be broken into incremental steps

for bigger projects, then you concentrate on the increments

one at a time. Another book I recommend is The One Thing by

Gary Keller and Jay Papasan. If you are puzzled by what to do

next, then use Keller's technique that he calls the

focusing question. And it is what's the one thing I can do

such that by doing it, everything else will be easier

or unnecessary. This focuses you on something you can do in the

moment to move you forward. You can modify this question for

each area of your life. In your case, it might be for this

novel, what is the one thing I can do this week, such that by

doing it, everything else will be easier or unnecessary.

Perhaps the best focus of your efforts this week is figuring

out the system of magic for your epic fantasy novel, or writing

the introduction for a character or finishing chapter 12 Whatever

it is, that's your one thing. Keep your efforts incremental.

So you don't fall victim to overwhelm and let author fade,

get a foothold. You have your author mission statement

written, you have formed new habits that you have broken into

increments. But how do you make those changes permanent? To

avoid author fade? Answers to these questions in a moment.

Writing pursuits is run by Kathrese. McKee, who has been

new level of excellence. cutleries is a three story

methods certified editor who specializes in story

diagnostics, coaching, and line editing to help you prepare your

story for the journey ahead. For more information, go to writing

pursuits.com. The link is in the show notes. And now, back to the

podcast, measurement beat author fade with scorekeeping now that

you have your vision written down, and your habits and your

increments. You need to measure your results measurement is the

piece I have the most trouble with. I'm being honest here. But

all you need is a spreadsheet, or a piece of paper for simple

scorekeeping. Measurement keeps you honest. All you're doing is

collecting data to adjust your efforts. refining your goals and

keeping things real. Measurement is fun. You can gamify your

efforts by keeping score. You're playing against yourself your

best scores while you meet your goals and works toward rewards.

And then make sure you celebrate victories and reward yourself

along the way. Measurement is the key to tracking your

progress. You guessed that I'm going to recommend another book.

The 12 week year for writers by AIG Trevor Thrall his book is an

expansion on another great book, the 12 week year by Brian P.

Moran and Mike liddington. But thralls book specifically for

writers and I found it very helpful. Thrall discusses

measurement in detail. But basically, you decide what the

measurement is going to be and keep score. So did you write in

your journal today? Yes or No, mark it down. If you've set the

bar at seven times per week and you do it six times, then at the

end of the week, you have an 85% success rate. That's your score.

Measurement provides data for success, getting a 100% success

rate for the week.

is not always necessary. But if you fall below 80%, you probably

need to make an adjustment somewhere. As you can tell, this

feeds perfectly into creating habits scorekeeping is itself a

habit.

So make it as obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying

as possible. Keep your scorecard handy schedule your scorekeeping

and keep your appointment in education. We call this

reflection, an important part of learning that is often

neglected. So make a scorecard and schedule your reflection

time just a few minutes every week to record your data and

reflect on how to improve. The last step is accountability. And

it isn't what you think it is. And I'm going to have trouble

with the word accountability. So just bear with me, I think

people and especially Americans get accountability, all wrong.

We have the saying in America especially hold people

accountable. And in my opinion, that's garbage. Moran and Lenin

can address this in their book, the 12 week year, and I'm going

to quote that accountability is something we own, it cannot be

impressed on us by others, or impressed on others by us. And I

know I'm going to get pushback on this. Accountability means

taking ownership, it must be intrinsic to be effective.

Intrinsic means the motivation comes from the inside. If what

we think of as accountability is extrinsic, coming from the

outside, then we are actually talking about consequences.

Accountability is intrinsic consequences are extrinsic. You

may think this is purely semantics. But when I was a

public school teacher, I had to apply penalties and rewards for

the actions my students chose to take. If they did the work. They

earned the positive benefits. If they didn't do the work, then

they faced negative consequences. But these

consequences both positive and negative, works intrinsic which

means I applied them to the students from the out side,

consequences are only effective for a short time. true success

comes from intrinsic accountability. Accountability

means taking ownership, if a student is self motivated, that

means they have taken ownership and they are accountable to

themselves. If an author is self motivated, that means they have

taken ownership and they are accountable to themselves, they

are calling the shots, they are determining their success, they

are making a commitment to themselves. Accountability means

taking ownership, ownership cannot come from the outside, it

has to come it must come from inside a person. Okay? I said

all that to say this, it helps to report your results to others

on a regular basis. And that's where accountability groups come

in. Just knowing you're scheduled to report your results

to others, helps you get things done because you want to feel

good about your report, write letters, that satisfaction thing

again. So find a group of like minded, accountable people who

also need to report their results. And if you can't find a

group make a group having an accountability group is a proven

technique for staying on point with your goals. I have a

warning about these groups. So your accountability group

members are not, quote holding you accountable. Unquote. They

are there to report the results. The group should not exist to

punish you or to reward you and if they believe that providing

consequences is their job, you need to find another group find

your organize and accountability group group members can also ask

questions and offer suggestions or mentioned resources. The

reward if you call it that is for you to experience the

satisfaction of reporting good results as measured by yourself

against your own standards and accountability group with

regular check in times provide several key benefits doing

things together. Motivation, learning by observing others

feedback, some gentle critique, and structure. So take

accountability for your work, and join a group for all its

potential benefits are formed one of your own In conclusion,

if you have faded recommit, find your reasons why. Keep score,

hold yourself accountable with the help of a group and make

incremental steps that add up to habits that will ultimately lead

to success as you define it. So the question of the week is Do

you have tips and tricks for overcoming author fade? Help

others by leaving your answers in the comments at writing for

suits.com forward slash podcast forward slash 49. That's all I

have for today. Until next time, keep writing.

Thank you for joining us today. If you enjoyed this episode,

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pursuits. Tips for authors that link and all the links mentioned

in today's episode are in the show notes at writing

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keep writing my friends. Keep writing