The two images below were taken almost exactly a year apart.
The image on the left is what my book manuscript looked like when I was trying to figure it all out.
The image on the right was taken a year later (a week ago). As finished as it will ever be.
It easy to look at a finished book and think, oh, this makes sense. They must have just sat down and wrote it like THAT. haha! No.
The idea of sitting down and writing a book from beginning to end sounds horrible and impossible. Like climbing up a sheer rock face with wet hands and Vasoline feet. It sounds like something I do not want to do.
So, I never sat down to write A Book. I don’t advise doing that. I wrote a bunch of little things, gathering them like handfuls of feathers or stones.
Then, I laid them out like bones along a curving spine, to see how they fit together. There was no linear path, no backwards or forwards. I wrote my way out of the woods.
Oh—and I worried. I was at turns mystified and then frustrated by it all. Feared I’d gone and painted myself into a derivative corner. Worried I’d upset people or that I wouldn’t elicit any emotion whatsoever.
What’s very meta about Unfollow Your Passion is that it is both a guide to AND the result of me unsticking myself—from doubt, from wearying self-criticism, from the halting fear that I would never know enough or be enough.
I teach the very method that keeps me writing. And not only do I believe I’m at my very best when I’m leading those workshops, I see everyone at THEIR best, too.
Registration for my flagship program, the Six Week Sprint, closes this week. We’re almost full, but we do have a few spots for people who want to be there.
Learn more here:
You may never ever do this, but you might know someone who would, someone who’s stuck or sad or bewildered and would love time on the page with some solid people to write their way out of it.
Send them my way.