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5 Ways to Create Meaningful Success in Your Writing
An interesting book crossed the writing.ie desk recently. Called The 5 States of Success it outlines how to create meaningful success in your career, business and life. This sounds like something we could all do with so we asked its author Brendan Foley to write a short piece for us on how this could apply to writers. This is his article…
My name is Brendan Foley. Recently I launched my second book The 5 States of Success- create meaningful success in your career, business and life. It’s available as an ebook and paperback and is an amazon.co.uk #1 bestseller. The audio book launches in March 2012.
I’d like to share with you The 5 States of Success for writers, five ways that have successfully helped me to write and publish two books. My hope is that they may help you too!
A state is a way of being; something that affects how you think, feel and behave. To have success we must get into the right states of being and from this place we can create really great work. I’ve adapted my 5 States to the specific needs of writers and authors.
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A Beginners Guide to Blogging - Setting Up Your Blog
It is a great way to identify and connect with your audience; to share your thoughts and opinions, to keep people up to date on your writing progress and a great way to blow off some steam. I am, of course, talking about blogging, a fantastic tool for any writer or prospective writer. Blogging provides a platform to showcase your work, to gain a dedicated following and, most importantly, it is readily available to anyone who wants to write. With that in mind, dedicated blogger Michelle Moloney-King presents a comprehensive guide to setting up your blog.
Buy your domain
Are you aware that your blog can be deleted or even sold at any time? You have no right to it, unless you buy the domain. It costs about id="mce_marker"2.00, is easy to do and it looks better. Find out how to do this for blogger here http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?answer=76543 and wordpress here http://www.tourismkeys.ca/blog/getyourowncom.pdf
Read more: A Beginners Guide to Blogging - Setting Up Your Blog
The Scribbler's Apprentice
When I was in school, career guidance ran the narrow gamut from you’re-useless-so-just-get-a-job-delivering-for-a-shop up to the dizzy heights of doing the open exams for the civil service. There was certainly no advice for the business end of being a writer, i.e., how do you actually make a living while you engage in unremunerated (or poorly remunerated) scribbling? So the only template available to me when I decided I wanted to write was a mélange of clichés, stereotypes, and literary biographies.
After finishing school I took a year off. This was not (try as I might) the Brideshead Revisited–flavoured “Grand Tour of Europe.” Not for me the Doge’s Palace or the waters at Baden-Baden. I spent a lot of time on the dole mooching around town, pretending to be in Trinity, haunting the Winding Stair bookshop, the Municipal Gallery, and Gallagher’s Coffee Shop in Middle Abbey Street, and attending a few very discouraging poetry workshops.
How did one get into the writers’ guild? You did not see ads in garret windows: Poetaster Requires Apprentice. Apply Within. According to the models available to me, university was the seemingly logical place for the aspiring writer to go and learn something. So go I did, matriculating by the skin of my teeth thanks to a C in Latin. I studied Pure English, popularly reckoned to be the third most unemployable degree offered by the National University of Ireland after Pure Philosophy, and Pure History. There was some learning, some loutishness, a lot of leaning on bars, and a little desultory writing—but that was, it seemed to me, part of the trajectory: a poem here, a short story there, and hours and hours of talking nonsense about writing something without actually doing it.
Inspiration Vs. Perspiration
“Success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration” goes the old saying by Thomas Edison.
We, as authors, would probably prefer to think of our ideas as being delivered from on high by the Muses, as we lay back on a chaise longue like Oscar Wilde spouting witty monologues. Doesn’t work that way, unfortunately. The idea of the tortured but inspired artist goes back to the Romantics like Byron and Shelley and – while it’s a nice image – it’s far from the truth.
What the author would like to believe he looks like …
Becoming a Writer with Orna Ross
From 2002 to 2008, I ran a writing school and literary agency in Dublin and brought a number of writers to publication. Through that work I met so many new writers who had barely put pen to page before asking about how to find an agent or get published. They never wanted to hear that this is like trying to whip the cart down the road without having harnessed the horse.
They wanted to be ‘A Writer’ without accepting what that means - That you’ve got to do the work. Lay down sentences and paragraphs, like an athlete lays down miles. Put words through your fingers, like a musician drums scales. Go on your knees to the mysteries of inspiration, like a priest before an altar.
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