What would it be like to take an entire month off to just write a book? Would writing a book become easier if you had less distractions? That's exactly what I wanted to find out. I'm just coming off of a 30-day writing sabbatical and I want to share with you 5 BIG lessons I learned. Let's get started!
Links Mentioned: http://BloggingYourPassion.com/discover
Implement the Blogging System that 40x My Online Business! Click here to get the training video
What would it be like to take an entire month off to just write a book? Would writing a book become easier if you had less distractions? That's exactly what I wanted to find out. I'm just coming off of a 30-day writing sabbatical and I want to share with you 5 BIG lessons I learned. Let's get started!
Links Mentioned: http://BloggingYourPassion.com/discover
Implement the Blogging System that 40x My Online Business! Click here to get the training video
Hello and welcome to the blogging your passion podcast. I'm your host, Jonathan Milligan, and we're on a mission here to help a thousand bloggers go full time in the next five years. Now you might be saying, Jonathan, where have you been? I've been getting tons of emails and feedback from people asking"Jonathan, there's been no podcast the last several weeks. Are you discontinuing this podcast? Are you not going to do it anymore?" And the answer is we're going to continue. So we wrapped up season one and we're moving into season two. It's going to be published and start coming to you weekly next week. But let me explain to you the reason for the pause. In June, we actually did a live event blogging your passion live event and we had people from over several states and even other countries come and spend two whole days at our blogging your passion live event. And we had so much fun. We're going to do it again next year and we would love for you to come and hang out in person. And then in July I actually did a 30 day a writing sabbatical, which basically means I am plugged from everything and just focused on writing my new book. If some of you have heard, uh, we recently signed a book contract with Baker books for a book upcoming next year, fall of 20, 20, entitled, Your Message Matters and it's for those of you who want to take a message, you want to take your skills and you want to turn it into a profitable business and we're going to help you to define it, to live it and ultimately market it and create multiple income streams from your message. Whether you want to blog or podcast or do videos. There is a tremendous opportunity right now for creative entrepreneurs to build a business around something they're passionate about. So even though next week starts season two of the podcast, which by the way, season one was all about discovering your blog niche. And I would encourage you, if you're at that phase where you're trying to figure out what do I start a business about, I'd encourage you to go back and listen to those eight episodes. They answer the biggest questions that came out of a deep dive survey we did with our existing audience, and it'll really help you to select the right niche to move forward on. Also, there's a blueprint that goes along with it that you can grab as well. It's a nine page blueprint that I put together called discover your blog and niche, and you can grab your own copy by going to blogging your passion.com/discover now, next week we're going to begin season two, which is about launching your blog. You know, there's so many moving parts to getting your website set up, your branding. What are those essential areas that you need to have set up before you start promoting your website? And that's we're going to be talking about over the next several weeks. But I've thought I would pop in for a little bit to cover an important topic today. And that's this five lessons I learned from my 30 day book writing Sabbatical. So at the beginning of the year, one of my goals was to land a traditional book deal. So I began going through the process of putting together a book proposal and then getting a book agent and sending it out to over 20 different publishers. And then we landed with a contract with Baker books. Super excited. Uh, many of my favorite authors have been published by Baker books, uh, people like Michael Hyatt, Mark Batterson and many others. And so it's just really a humbling experience and I'll be talking a little bit about that today of what it's like to actually go through the process of writing a book. And so I decided that for the month of July, I wanted to clear my schedule, actually step away or 100% away from my day to day business and let my operations manager take over and totally run the business for me. And I just focused on one thing, waking up each day, writing my book and spending time with my family and that's what I did. But you know what? It wasn't always great, and I'm going to share with you today a little bit of the lessons that I learned along the way in case you ever want to get to that place of writing a book in a short period of time. So let's get into these. Number one, the first lesson I learned is to get the messy first draft written. So as I began to study other authors, other best selling authors who are writing books, some of them were writing a book every year. One of the things I discovered was something very common, and that's this. You got to just get the messy first draft out of your head. In other words, you can't write an edit, right? And Edit your way to getting that first draft written. In fact, some authors call it the vomit draft. It's literally just getting ideas on to paper. Now, of course they're organized into chapters, but it's just getting things out of your head. I also watched a video from Brendon Burchard. He described his writing process and one of the things he said was that that first draft is like an ugly, clammy shell and you, you just, you just take that thing and you continue to work at and continue to work at once you get it out on paper until it's this beautiful pearl when it's finally published. And I had to really adopt that mindset because there were times where I wanted to go back and wanted to fix things. I wanted to rewrite a certain paragraphs with shorter sentences, make it more punchy. And there's a time for that, but it's not in that first draft. And once I gave myself permission, I stopped analyzing my writing and I started just getting into the flow. There's just something beautiful about when you fully give in to the art of writing out your thoughts. It's almost like it, it becomes a musical, uh, kind of like a symphony of a flow that happens with your fingers on the keyboard. It's the only way I can describe it where you're just letting things out of the, out of your head and you're putting things on the paper and stuff bubbles up that you hadn't thought about before. So that's the first lesson I wanted to share with you today is get the messy first draft written. Alright, here's lesson number two. You have to act your way into a feeling. There wasn't any mornings that I woke up and said, I just feel like writing. I just can't wait to get started writing. It doesn't work that way. Most people try to feel their way into action and that's the wrong way to do it. You have to act your way into a filling. In fact, I remember hearing this a in a book I once read that was, uh, his book about writing and it was Stephen King. Most of us, uh, know of Stephen King, whether or not you've really read his work or not. And one of the things he said was that inspiration for him strikes every morning at 8:00 AM because that's what he sits down and starts to write. He does a wait for inspiration to strike. He gets started and I noticed that was a lot of my days during my writing sabbatical. That's what happened. I would sit down, even the first couple of sentences, I felt like I didn't even know how to structure a sentence in the right way. I just do. It just doesn't feel like it's flowing, but there was always a moment where things began to click and it began to flow and it began to happen, but it was never before I sat down to write. It was after I was in the middle of writing, so that's less. Number two, you have to act your way into a feeling and if you want to write a book, you have to do the same thing. Maybe you've been wanting to write a book for a while. Maybe you already have the chapters for your book. Maybe you have a book that's half written because you're just waiting for inspiration to strike, but I'm telling you it doesn't work that way. You have to act your way into a filling. Number three, lesson number three, set a trap in the morning for creative work. Now whether you get to do a 30 day writing sabbatical or you're just working on your book in between the margins of your life, uh, I want you to learn this lesson. Set a trap in the morning. So if you have a day job, maybe it's setting a trap at 5:00 AM from five to 7:00 AM you get up and you spend two hours every morning writing your book. I don't remember the person, the author at the moment of this podcast recording cause it just came back to me. But in the book of rest where the author begins to describe how different authors worked, and it was one author in particular who back in the I believe early 19 hundreds he had a day job at the post office. He lived in the UK and he was a best selling author, but he just loved his postal job. And so he would write his books first thing in the morning. He would give it an hour or two every morning. And then over the course of his career, he wrote and published over 40 books all in the space of just a couple of hours in the morning. Pretty amazing, isn't it? To think about set a trap in the morning for creative work. I found that if I just decided to kind of push my work off or sleep in, or maybe I'll just write in the afternoon, it never worked out for me. I had a s I had to set a trap in the morning to get my creative work done. That's less than three lesson number four. Don't let the resistance define you. Now, you've probably heard this concept before, if you've been around the world of creative work or writings from Steven Pressfield, he talks about it a lot in his work about facing the resistance. All creatives face this resistance and sometimes it's the imposter syndrome. It's who are you to do this work? You are not good enough to make this happen, and I found that these types of voices started showing up during this 30 day writing sabbatical. I would sit down to write and I would have thoughts like, Jonathan, you know your title, your message matters is such a great title. Somebody else out there is more qualified than you to write it. They've got a better story. They have better experience. Maybe they're a better writer. And I had to allow those, those thoughts to kind of come and leave. I could not let it define me or it would shut me down. It's like, have you ever maybe as a kid, a laid down outside in the grass and watch the clouds go by, make the resistance, the clouds where you're staring up at the clouds, but you're just kind of watching it come. You're acknowledging it and letting it pass. You're not letting it define you because your truth is the blue sky and that blue sky is your message. It's the thing that you want to get out there, the area that you're passionate about, that you want to help others and you want to serve others with your message. And so see those thoughts of resistance as the clouds that yes, they're there, but just let them pass by. They don't define you. And that was lesson number four. And then finally, lesson number five from my 30 day book writing Sabbatical. Was this your best work shows up in the middle of your work? In other words, a lot of the time it wasn't about, again, me finding a great story or doing some searching on the Internet to get an angle to write about. It was literally in the middle of writing new ideas what emerge things that I hadn't thought about before. Things that surprised me, uh, points and ideas and stories from my childhood. And uh, you know, different illustrations from other books that I had read years ago that I would searching for. I remember reading a story about this and now including it in my work. So again, this is a reason why you have to just get started. You have to start putting words on a page because your best work is going to show up for you in the middle of your work while you're writing your best thoughts, ideas, concepts, strategies, stories, illustrations. They're not gonna show up necessarily before you sit down, although they could. But what I found during my writing sabbatical is that they showed up in the middle of writing words on a page, and that's the beauty of giving in and doing your creative work. So let me just give a quick recap. Again, lesson one, get the messy first draft written less than two. You have to act your way into a feeling. Lesson three, set a trap in the morning for creative work. Less than four, don't let the resistance to find you and less than five your best work shows up in the middle of your work. Well, that's it for this edition of the blogging, your passion podcast. Again, thank you for listening to each and every episode. I know there's been a break, but hopefully now you understand why and what's coming. We are actively recording many new episodes for our brand new season that's going to be released starting next week, and it's going to be all about my best tips and strategies for launching your blog to the world. How do you get your first 1000 views on your blog and capture your first 1000 fans? And that's exactly where we're going to be walking you through in the days ahead. So until then, go out there, build your passion, and make your mark
Speaker 1:[inaudible].