Dave Baldwin

Eating and drinking the right things at the right times is essential to being a great writer. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what they are.

For some writers, pizza and beer may be essential. For others, bran muffins and tree bark might be ideal. You may need both. A generally upward trend in nutrition, with room for setbacks, seems to be the best formula for success.

Avoid the purity pitfall. Newbies in all walks of life often make promises they cannot keep. “From now on, I’m going to eat only organic vegetables and run every day.” The professional writer knows her limitations. She accounts for weakness of the flesh when laying plans.

You must allow your flesh to indulge its pleasures at the optimal intervals and intensity levels, without exceeding the necessary doses. If that means spending a day eating ice cream in bed every now and then, make sure you do it. But if you only need 2 hours of eating ice cream in bed to indulge yourself back to health, don’t take 3.

Add healthy things into your diet at every opportunity, and remove unhealthy things from your everyday routine. Some people find that quitting bad habits cold turkey is better, while others find that gradually reducing intake is better.

Do what works for you, but always be seeking the rhythm.

Writers often take a day off when they feel “uninspired” or out of ideas. In fact, this is often the best time to write. When you have exhausted your complement of knowledge and easy ideas, it forces you to get down into the trenches. It forces you to rely on divine inspiration for words. It forces your ego to get out of the way and allow language to be channeled through you, onto the page.

Have you ever had the experience of watching something write itself through your fingers? If not, the best and most reliable way to produce this effect is to write when you don’t feel like writing. It’s ironic how many writers don’t write because they don’t feel inspired. These are the moments you should be waiting for.

Waiting to get inspired is like waiting for the wind to blow your way, or waiting for traffic lights to turn green. Real writers don’t wait for circumstances to cooperate. Real writers write no matter what.

If you aren’t out to create waves and make a lasting difference in the way people think, act, make decisions, and conduct political relations, you will have a hard time pushing past the wall. It takes real determination to tap the creative stream when it isn’t flowing your way on its own. This is a challenge. It’s the universe saying, “How serious are you?” If you’re not that serious, you need to rethink the reason why you are even writing in the first place.

This is, in other words, one of those times when “I just know I have to tell my story” is not a good enough reason. These are the moments that require you to push forward and become a new person. As you delve into the rhythm of writing, you will begin to regularly encounter moments of non-inspiration and learn to keep pushing forward into them all. You will start to get comfortable with this practice, and you will find yourself going a little farther each time.

Magical moments begin to occur. Just when you think you are out of ideas, you will find yourself breaking through a barrier, and new ideas will start flooding again. During these times, you’ll be planning to turn in for the night and stay up four more hours writing. Pushing over these humps also often creates new clarity as to the purpose, core message, and audience for your writing. Give it a try.

Share your writing and watch how people react to it. Then, watch how you react to their reactions.

A common trap of the novice writer: asking for feedback when you really just wanted praise and a pat on the back. Amateurs with fragile egos do this all the time. Then, they get offended when people give them the feedback they asked for.

Serious writers are only interested in feedback for the purpose of making their writing the best it can be.

You’ll know when you’re becoming serious about your writing when praise starts to annoy you.

Writing was never meant to be a struggle, nor was it meant to be quick and easy. It seems that beginning writers often believe exactly the opposite.

Too often, one can find a writer struggling to motivate himself to write. Other writers exert their fullest creative force devising the perfect strategy or concept for a book. They all believe the same thing: that if they impose enough pointless suffering on themselves, it will result in a brilliant flash of insight, after which the process of writing will suddenly become a cakewalk. The idea that a flash of inspiration will carry you downstream and spare you the trouble of consistent hard work is nothing but a nice bedtime story.

Inspiration sometimes comes in quick bursts, but they are irregular. The more regularly you go to work on your writing, the more you’ll be able to make use of the bursts. A creative burst is divine inspiration showing up on your doorstep to find out if you’ve prepared for the challenge. Inspiration is a signal to step up your game and start working harder.

When you take your cue and begin to write every day whether you’re inspired or not, magic begins to happen. You’ll find yourself strangely compelled to write, even though you have no great ideas and no energy left. You’ll feel as if you can’t help but to show up and write. There will be times when you sit at the keyboard with nothing to say, and then the words start flowing. When you respond to inspiration by pedaling harder, buckle in. The ride gets exciting from there.

You will begin to experience a new intensity that may be unbearable at first. It will be uncomfortable, and it will be demanding. You will adjust to it over time, and you’ll soon become the kind of writer who can’t wait to write. You will write like your life depends on it, because you’ll realize that it does.

People and events will start lining up in perfect ways. Opportunities will appear at ideal times, in the right sequences. You will experience a metamorphosis of the soul, and you will start to see a new vision for your life. It is that vision which will compel you to write every day. It is the writing process that will give clarity to your life vision.

It’s an upward spiral, and it’s a thrill. All you need to do is throw yourself in.

If you want to produce quality writing, you cannot afford the luxury of a soul-sucking job where you dread going to work every day. You will find it nearly impossible to keep your creativity flowing while immersed in an environment filled with griping, dysfunctional people.

At the same time, until you have developed as a professional writer, your fledgling creativity will not be able to bear the weight of your financial burdens. If you attempt to pay your bills by coming up with creative writing ideas, the experience will be somewhat like a car spinning its wheels in the mud. Your writing efforts will degrade into a job – one that doesn’t pay.

If your current line of work isn’t supporting your efforts to become a writer, find a new job. Start looking immediately. Get a job that allows you to do some writing at work, if you can manage to find one. More importantly, though, get a job where you look forward to going to work every day. Even if that means taking a giant pay cut, do it. If it means selling your house and moving to a much smaller one, do it. If it means giving up most of the luxuries to which you’ve grown accustomed, don’t worry. You won’t miss them. You will come to find the writing process much more rewarding than a flashy car.

Don’t quit your job and get yourself evicted. If changing jobs creates unmanageable chaos in your life, don’t do it. Find a different way. But don’t use this as an excuse to do nothing.

If you do nothing else this week, buy back your soul. It’s a good investment and it pays healthy dividends.

Learning foreign languages is a practice I highly recommend for every writer. I recommend, if possible, to put yourself into an immersive environment where people don’t speak one word of your native tongue. You’ll start to notice a number of peculiar things happening when you do this.

Speaking someone else’s language forces you to slow down your communication. You can’t just rattle off words at the speed of blabber. You can’t just put your mind on loudspeaker. Your mind has to stop and translate; at least in the early stages of language learning. This delay requires you to communicate the critical and substantial thoughts only. You will also begin to appreciate which words you actually need the most.

There’s a more subtle benefit to learning another language. The subtle differences in the way words are enunciated will force you to learn to push sounds through different parts of your nose and throat. They’ll force you to learn to physically produce different tones. It will also force you to listen more intently.

There comes a point, when learning a foreign language, that you realize how little you understand anybody – even people who speak your native tongue. You come to realize that people don’t listen to most of what you say, and you don’t really hear what they say. Real communication happens heart-to-heart, and when speaking a foreign language, you have no choice but to rely on this fact. You begin to think differently about all language.

In writing, the same heart-to-heart communication is equally essential. Your spirit has to be infused into every single word that leaves your fingertips. Putting your mind on loudspeaker doesn’t work on paper any more than it works in person. If you aren’t putting serious effort into the words you speak, why should you expect anyone to put serious effort into listening?

The process of learning someone else’s language requires you to exercise much more effort than most people typically put into their communication.  When you practice speaking and listening in foreign languages, you will naturally find yourself putting more effort into all of your communication. You can’t help but become a better writer with this kind of training under your belt.

Great writers are feisty and competitive. They obsess over their writing. They continually refine it to make the words as sharp and effective as they can possibly be. They cleanse and feed their hearts regularly, making time for walks in the park and afternoons of painting. They do this because they know that it is necessary to keep their competitive edge sharp.

Playing games is an important component in a writer’s regimen of activity. It can be any kind of game, really. The game can be baseball, Twister, football, backgammon, chess, Dungeons and Dragons, Scrabble, tennis, Super Mario Brothers, Texas Hold ‘Em, hide and seek, Black Jack, Guitar Hero, truth or dare, dodgeball, or just about anything else. The type of game is unimportant. What matters is that you summon forth the ruthless spirit of competition.

Choose your games wisely. Play interactive games. Play games that show you different sides of people’s character. Play games that speak to your heart. Play games that reflect who you are. Play competitive games where there is a winner and a loser. Play games that allow players to experience the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. Keep score.

When you meet a new person and they look like potential allies, invite them to play a game with you. An ideal way to introduce new people into a community is to set up a standing game night at regular intervals. The conversations that form around the game will reveal much about people in a single night that otherwise would have taken months or years to unmask.

The way people behave in a game will show you how they handle defeat, how they respond to setbacks, and how they treat victory. It will show you how easily they become complacent, and how easily they get nasty when things don’t go their way. It will also show you how well luck favors them. Finally, it will show you if they know how to recognize and act on a good opportunity when they see one.

Playing games forces you to shape your thinking according to time limits, scoreboards, and focused objectives. Open-ended thinking and endless brainstorming are dangerous distractions. Games do not allow for open-ended thinking. They require concentration and focus, which are absolutely essential for any writer. Most importantly, competition will remind you that the clock is ticking, and that every second of laziness is causing you to lose ground.

I would tell you to live what you write, but I don’t do that myself.

Whenever your writing contains advice, take notice of any advice you give and don’t follow. Then, start following it. Hint: the advice you feel the strongest about is often the very advice you’re least likely to follow.

The more advice you give, the more you increase your chances of being exposed as a hypocrite.

Being exposed as a hypocrite is beneficial. It improves your writing. When your hypocrisy is comfortably hidden from public view, only the most virtuous among us are sufficiently motivated to do anything about it. When you have to look people in the eye and admit that you continue to take no action about things that completely lack integrity, things start to get much more uncomfortable and your motivation begins to change.

Use the process of writing to discover ways in which you are betraying your life’s purpose. Seek to clean these up and remove them. Be bold, therefore, in your advice-giving. The bolder you are, the more hypocrisy you will uncover in your own backyard. If you take immediate and aggressive action to restore integrity to your life according to what you discover, your writing will flourish and resonate in the hearts of many.

If you discover hypocrisy and ignore it, it will eat away at your self-expression like a cancer. You will die a slow and comfortable death, only to realize the life you would rather have lived. Every one of us is in perpetual danger of sliding backwards, losing all that has been gained. Like cancer, hypocrisy spreads into as many areas of your life as you will allow it to. Like cancer, hypocrisy demands urgency. Waiting even one day can mean the difference between life and death.

Hypocrisy also clouds your thinking. When allowed to reign long enough, it takes over your thinking. Given enough time, it will take over your life and your being. It will systematically isolate you from your allies, who will lose respect for you. It will surround you with enemies, who will keep your heart and mind contaminated with the poison of cynicism until you die.

Seek first to discover and root out any hypocrisy, no matter how small. It will grow big a lot faster than you think.

Your physical energy is a good indicator of whether or not you are on the right track with your writing. When you feel tired and ready for a nap, you are thinking about the wrong things. When you are oriented in the right direction, you will feel a surge of positive energy that puts right back into your sails, even if it’s been more than twenty-four hours since the last time you slept.

There is a mysterious but seemingly-inexhaustible source of energy that each of us has the ability to tap when we are on a mission. When we are determined, we can find energy just about anywhere. Personally, I’ve found this effect to be especially pronounced during the writing process.

Energy ebbs and flows; it doesn’t stay high or stay low. It moves up and down in a rhythm, almost like breathing. When it’s high, use it. It’s about to dip, so don’t waste the opening. When it’s low, pull back. Wait for it to return. Retreat into silence and don’t try to do anything in the meantime. You’ll be more productive that way.

I used to act as if energy stayed stagnant. When I was tired, I would use caffeine and other stimulants to pull myself back up. When I was on fire with energy, I would do the kind of thinking that I should have done when I was low.

I recommend keeping up a certain minimum amount of writing each day, no matter how tired you are. Beyond this, go by your energy level and let it ride. There will be days when you write a lot, and there will be days when you don’t write much.