Samhain Publishing Ltd Weblog

The Smiley Face Factor

Sometimes it’s the small things that make the difference between finishing your first book and setting it aside before you ever reach the end. For me that small thing was smiley face stickers. Like a lot of aspiring writers, I had the ideas (too many really) but not always the determination and motivation to see them through.

I’d never heard that writing the first few chapters of a book tends to be the easier part, and once all the newness wears off, the real hard work begins. Cue the procrastination. Most of the time I didn’t even realize I was avoiding writing, or when I did write, I fell into the revision pit and constantly reworked the first few chapters in search of perfection. Took me a while to realize that five shiny chapters did not a complete book make.

Knowing that and reaching the finish line were of course two very different things, especially since I continued to struggle with keeping my butt planted in front of my computer. I tried rewards to keep myself motivated – not a good idea when my drug of choice was books and it was much easier to turn the pages than to fill blank ones.

I tried encouraging my husband to ask me every day how the writing was going. But once it started sounding like the much-dreaded equivalent to “what did you do all day?” I nipped that in the bud. That brief experience did teach me that being accountable for my daily page count was improving my output, but that I was the only person who would truly care enough about hitting my goals.

Right around this time, I was going through some boxes and found sheets of smiley face stickers in my teaching supplies. Like everything else, the stickers sat on the corner of my desk for quite a while. We won’t talk about the family of dust bunnies I displaced in the process of my intended reorganization.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks later when I grabbed one of those stickers—after a seriously kickass writing day—and put one of those smiley faces up on my calendar. When I sat down the next time to write, I couldn’t help but glance at the calendar (which hung right above my desk) and be reminded of the day before. So I wrote more and when I finished, I put another sticker up on my calendar. It wasn’t long before I became addicted to putting those stickers up to mark my progress. I wanted to see every box filled in with a bright yellow smile, and the days left empty began bothering more and more—so I wrote and wrote and wrote.

It took me two months of smiley faces to get a complete rough draft of my first book, and even if the rest wasn’t as shiny as those first few chapters, it was finished. I had done it. I had finally written a book.

Even with a couple dozen stories under my belt since then, there are still times when I find myself hunting for those stickers to get me over a rough patch with a work in progress. :)

For the aspiring and published authors out there, do you have any little tricks that help you reach The End? Or if your not a writer, have you found any tips or tricks that help you accomplish a goal when you find yourself procrastinating? Comment and be entered to win your choice of download from my backlist. Contest open until Friday.

Sydney
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www.sydneysomers.com
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