Every so often, I jump into the archives to see what is and isn't working here at Writers In the Storm. I look closely at the posts that are getting more attention to determine whether we should ask the contributor to continue with a series on a topic or whether there might be a tie-in with a current post. I look to see which posts successfully keep the top spots, year after year. (For example, only a few of the posts below happened in the last 18 months - most are older.)
It's always an interesting journey for me through the blog stats, and it seems like the list always offers me something I needed RIGHT NOW, such as Margie's post on hugs in the top spot below.
Perhaps that will happen for you today as well.
Who Got the Top Spots for 2021?
I removed the posts that get a bump by being included on top blogs or curated lists, and also any pages. But below is a list of the fourteen WITS articles that performed the best this year. I even left the numbers in, just in case those contributors wander on by (so they can bask in their amazingness).
Except for two outliers -- Janice Hardy's writing life post and Melinda VanLone's article on book covers -- all of these posts are about writing craft.
Another interesting observation is that each post also covers most of the SMART goal spectrum. That means the topics and information in the post are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and anchored within a Time Frame. Basically, these posts offer tips that you can immediately practice and apply to your own work in progress.
I'm just a happy little blogger, but I'm pretty sure that last point is why these posts are "evergreen." After you poke around in the links above, I hope you'll let me know what you decide.
My Thoughts and a Question
I always like posts that make me think about my writing in a new way, teach me something completely new (I'm thinking about Melinda VanLone's book cover posts), or that help me stretch a bit as a writer to develop new skills. I also like posts that get people to share tips in the comments, since there's nothing I like better than an active comment section.
My question to you... What types of posts are your favorite(s), and what new topics would you love to see covered here at WITS? Which of the 14 above is your favorite? Please let me know down in the comments!
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About Jenny
By day, Jenny Hansen provides corporate communications and LinkedIn advice for professional services firms. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction, and short stories. After 20 years as a corporate trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.
Today at Writers In The Storm we’re giving thanks for the “writerly” people and things that help us put words on the page. One of the things we're grateful for are the two new team members -- Lynette Burrows and Lisa Norman -- who have joined the behind-the-scenes team here at WITS. Please join us in welcoming them!
We're also opening the door for our readers! Share your gratitude for writerly things large and small down in the comments.
I am thankful for all the people who have helped shape my writing, occasionally nudging me in another direction to make a clearer, more interesting story.
Many eyes on our work makes all the difference in the world.
In a year that started with loss, I am grateful it was also about friends who stepped up to help.
It has been a year full of new opportunities for blogging, and writing, and writing friends. And I am especially grateful for the honor and delight that is being part of the WITS crew.
Jenny Hansen
I'm giving writerly thanks for TWO things.
First of all, I am deeply grateful to Lynette and Lisa for joining our team. We are a close-knit group behind the scenes here, doing what's required to keep WITS running. It is our honor to do that work, but it is still work. My fellow WITS Warriors amaze me with their energy, their ideas, and their talent.
I am also giving thanks for Melinda Cohan and her team at The Coaches Console for making my day job dreams come true. I am two months from officially launching a LinkedIn Coaching business and it brings up some of the same emotions as a story launch. It's exciting, invigorating, rewarding, AND terrifying.
Here is the quote from Melinda that has kept me moving forward this month.
I'm grateful for rekindling the joy of writing small and trying out short story contests this year! It was fun to write with others doing the same contests, and it reinvigorated my writing.
I'm grateful for the amazing camaraderie of writers from around the world.
Instead of isolation, I've found friendship and connection with fellow writers through NaNoWriMo, Lawson Writer's Academy, and Writers In the Storm. What a wonderful gift this connection is for all of us!
I'm also excited to moderate "It's a Wonderful Writer's Life," the December "advent calendar" of prompts for writers happening at the Lawson Writers Academy. It's going to be so much fun!
We won't be posting here on Friday this week, but we hope you continue to stop by to share your "writerly thanks" with us until we return on Monday.
If you're in the States, we hope you're preparing for a great Thanksgiving. If you're doing NaNoWriMo, we hope your word count is making you happy (or that you at least had fun). And wherever you are on your writing journey, we're thankful that you share your journey with us here at Writers In the Storm. Our readers are the BEST!
Writing is a career where it can feel that there are so many outside forces standing between you and your goals: work or home commitments that may keep us from your writing time; the agents or publishers who stand at the gates of career “success”; the booksellers or reviewers we need to help us reach readers.
But often the most formidable foe of our writing lies within ourselves.
I like to refer to these internal antagonists as the demons, and I used to think I was alone in all too frequently entertaining a panel of them: those insidious internal voices that instilled me with self-doubt.
But at a recent writer's retreat where each evening we held group discussions about a variety of writing-related topics, one night nearly 45 attendees showed up eager to talk about their demons—a subject brought up literally by popular demand.
It turns out most of us seem to suffer from some sort of demons: impostor syndrome, fear of failure, procrastination, comparison, or a host of others.
What Are These Demons?
Personal demons aren’t confined to our creative efforts—they may assail us in the workplace as we doubt our ability or efficacy, or at home, as we worry we’re failing as a parent or partner, or in the mirror, as we compare ourselves to the artificial standards held up by models and celebrities and social media.
But I think that they’re especially rampant among creatives.
Examples of Authors Battling Their Demons
Recently an author whose debut novel has won a dozen awards posted about self-doubt and feelings of comparison with other authors’ careers as they work on their second novel.
Another author, whose last book has remained in the rarefied air at the top of the Amazon charts since its release, garnering more than five thousand reviews and a 4.5 rating, castigated themselves during the editing process on their follow-up novel for the amount of revisions the story entailed—wondering why they didn’t “know better” by now.
An author who has had more than half a dozen well-received and popular published novels lost their publisher and worried that no other pub house would ever want to publish them.
These are demons I’ve witnessed recently among highly accomplished authors considered successful by most metrics. Among authors who haven’t yet achieved certain career milestones, the demons can grow even louder and more aggressive: “What makes you think you can write?” “You’ll never finish/get an agent/get published.” “You don’t have what it takes.”
And worse. Horrible personal judgments and attacks we’d never dream of saying to someone we cared about—or even to a stranger. Yet we batter ourselves from the inside with such negative, hurtful, destructive messages—we who should always be our own greatest champion, the one person we can count on for support no matter what.
Our various demons may be different, but they have two things in common: they all have at their root some version of “not good enough,” and they keep us from fully stretching our wings to see what we can do and reveling in our own achievements.
4 Steps to Wrangling the Demons
The difficult truth is, your demons will likely never be vanquished or banished. They are part of you—yours forever.
So how can we learn to overcome those negative messages our demons whisper in our ears to free ourselves to achieve our full potential—not just as writers, but in all walks of our lives?
First off, in the middle of an acute attack, the most important thing to do is to stop it immediately. The longer you let those automatic erroneous messages play on in your head, the more they gain steam and the more destruction they can do.
Call a positive, supportive friend or loved one who always makes you laugh. Go see a movie. Go for a hike in nature with your dogs.
Don’t wrangle the demons or try to reason them away—it’s almost impossible to do that in the middle of one of their attacks anyway. Just silence or ignore those voices in whatever way you can. Do not entertain their messages for one second.
Once the storm passes—and it will—it’s time to address them head-on.
Identify your demons:
Chances are excellent that your demons are always the same: mine are impostor syndrome, perfectionism, and comparison. Think about the commonalities in your bouts of self-doubt and see if you can put a name to yours. Before you can deal with your antagonist, you have to identify them.
Find the patterns:
Trace back what was happening in your life at the time the demons attacked. I’ve learned that when things are going extremely well for my career, my impostor syndrome demons come swarming out of their cave to shoot me down. When I find myself stuck—whether in creating a new workshop or course, writing an article on craft, or working on my own writing—often it’s the perfectionism or comparison demons gleefully holding me back.
Knowing the triggers allows you to get a handle on the demons before they run rampant over your psyche.
Take control:
Your demons actually came into existence to protect you in response to some inner wound—just like your characters’ vulnerabilities and fears stemmed from theirs. Their messages are intended to keep you from feeling pain—but they’ve never matured past their childish misinterpretations of what caused it, and their delusions come from irrational fear.
Luckily you have become an adult. You can reassure those demons that all is well and you have things under control, just as you would with a child scared of monsters.
This not only defuses their power, but it lets you even learn to love the demons a little, to be grateful to them for trying, in their limited understanding, to keep you safe.
And then hit them with a big dose of reality.
To paraphrase The Martian, logic the shit out of it:
When I have impostor syndrome, for instance, I remind myself that I’ve been in the publishing business for thirty years and have worked on literally thousands of manuscripts. I’m not putting anything over on anyone--I legitimately have this knowledge and am simply looking to share it.
The most important thing to remember—over and over again—is that these automatic messages are false, simply maladaptations to emotional pain that have been allowed free rein for so long, they’ve convinced you that they are the truth about you.
They are not.
Take yourself seriously—as a person, as a writer, as an artist. You are all these things, and you have nothing to prove to anyone, even your demons. Even yourself.
When do you find that your demons are most likely to attack your writer journey? What tips do you use to defend yourself from the internal writer blocks we all face? Share with our readers below.
