Decision vs. Indecision
episode 5
decision vs indecision
Sue Campbell
Writers face a ridiculous amount of choices. But we've got to get good and making them and moving on or we'll never get anywhere.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hey writers, you're listening to the pages and platforms podcast with book marketing and mindset coach Sue Campbell.
I hope you're all safe. Well, and writing. I was just sitting at my desk trying to decide what to record for you today and I was kind of spinning my wheels about it honestly. So I started looking through my list of ideas and I saw decision versus indecision. Perfect. Here I am sitting here wasting time because I really can't make up my mind what I wanted to talk to you about and that was exactly what I wanted to warn everyone about when I wrote down that idea. So let's go with it. As writers, we are faced with so many decisions. What will we write? How will we write it? What narrative device will we use? What software program will we use? What time of day will be right? Not to mention that we have to make enough decisions to populate an entire world. If we're writing fiction or if we're writing nonfiction, we have to choose what we need to convey to create an entire world for that reader that they might not be familiar with to really get it across.
We have to decide when it's time for a new approach. When something's not working, we have to decide when it's time to declare that the book is actually finished. Once the book is actually finished, we have to decide how to publish. Are we going to traditionally publish or publish independently and there are multiple sub trees of decisions for each of those choices. If I'm going to pitch an agent, which agents am I going to pitch? If I'm going to submit right to a small press, which small presses do I submit to? And if you're on the independent publishing side, there's a definitely baffling array of choices and decisions to be made at every step of the process as well. Then you get to marketing and marketing means a whole different set of choices and those are definitely baffling to the uninitiated and especially to those who aren't super excited about marketing to begin with.
So we face many, many decisions and we often feel like each one of those could make or break our career with every decision. We feel like everything is on the line. So we research and we weigh alternatives and we discuss it with our writing friends and we allow ourselves to get confused. And then too many of us often give up. It's too confusing. It's too hard. I'm not going to do it. I'm here to tell you that what can make or break her career is your ability to just make a damn choice and move on. When we're confused or overwhelmed, it's easy to just sit and do nothing and doing nothing will screw you so much faster and more than any decision you will ever make and carry out. So looking at this from a writing angle, for example, if you were writing a crisis question, right?
A crisis is a question. So if you're writing a crisis for one of your characters, would you spend five chapters letting that protagonist weigh their options and sit in their own head? Hell no. The reader is not going to put up with that. And you shouldn't tolerate it for yourself either. It's boring and it's not going to help you get anywhere. We need to exercise some tough love with ourselves and we all need this periodically. I'm certainly not immune to it. I wasn't even immune to it this morning, but I caught myself. So if you're hemming and hiding about something related to your current work in progress or your career right now, I want you to draw a line for yourself, give yourself a very limited amount of time to decide and then take action. So if you've already done a bunch of research and you're just spinning out and confusion, give yourself one more hour to decide.
Sit down and have a meeting with yourself and look at the pros and cons and then just choose and take the next follow on action for that choice. If it's something you haven't started researching yet because you're afraid to even do what it takes to set yourself up to decide, then give yourself no more than one week. Okay? If you really struggle with this, tell a friend you're going to report back to them by a certain time. And that they should hassle you if you don't, and then once you've actually made your decision and taken that first step to carry it out, I want you to have your own back. I want you to commit to seeing it through the way that you've now decided and don't spend any time second guessing yourself. You can always make a different choice later on if new information comes to light or what you tried didn't work, but you just wasted so much time and energy, choosing to stay confused or to second guess every choice you make and it's actually a cop out and you need to stop doing it and see what you can actually accomplish when you trust yourself enough to decide.
Thanks for joining me. Please consider leaving this podcast a rating and review on Apple podcasts and do checkout pages and platforms.com where you can sign up for our newsletter and get a free consultation with me or one of our story grid certified developmental editors plus many other free resources for writers.
Author marketing is confusing as hell! Too many writers are focused on the latest tactics and lack a sensible strategy. They don’t know how to integrate what actually works into their already busy schedule. And they don’t know who to turn to for help. Enter: The Happily Ever Author Club. It's an online membership community led by book marketing coach Sue Campbell and developmental editors Anne Hawley and Rachelle Ramirez. It's for authors who want to actually make an impact and sell books.