The Name of the Game

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about writing. I have also been thinking about the process of drawing attention to your writing via social media and marketing. Any starting artist quickly learns that the creative writing process is only half the battle. The next half is twice as challenging.

A quick word on the first half of the game. If you're anything like me, you come home to a comfortable space of your own personal design. You might have a comfortable chair, a modest desk setup, a nice bookshelf to glance at across the room. You likely always have the bedroom door shut. Even if you're in a sociable mood, you confine yourself to a cave where you begin to produce your art. It's a freeing feeling. The space may be small, but you are on an adventure. No one can hinder you on this adventure. It's just you and your own thoughts, or as I like to think of it, you and you. You are building a valuable relationship with you and together the two of you produce a product that you love and maybe someone else can learn to love.

Then comes the second step, getting people to look at your work in the first place. The name of the game is, you have to leave your cave. Uh oh! You have to return from isolation, come down from your cloud sailing, star reaching adventure and do some work down here in the dirt. You have to trudge through processes that aren't necessarily fun, produce writing that is not fictional, heavy, melodramatic or flamboyant. You have to write with the idea of marketing your project or product. And even more difficult to fathom, marketing yourself.

Smash these two steps together and you have a fundamental approach to getting your early work noticed. I have recently sat on brilliant seminars and come across terrific books that guide an artist through the early steps of creative success. They have sent me home considering all of the required steps to making myself a published author. Do you want to know one common denominator I've noticed throughout all of these steps? Writing.

To produce your art, you write. To sound out your ideas, be they film, comic, play, you likely write them down. To map out a plan to expose yourself to consumers, you have to write posts and passages designed to draw them in. To sell your book on Amazon, you will more than likely write a summary of the book to complete your profile. If someone reacts to your work, you may write that person back a response.

Throughout it all, you are writing. There is no step of the creative process that does not, to an extent, involve writing. It's not impossible to find a work around. You may just speak your marketing plan. You may rehearse how you plan to pitch your story in the mirror, becoming so well practiced that you can recite the speech every day of the week. But I think we can agree, writing always helps.

I am sometimes off put by the fact that I have to step away from my grand adventure space in order to take a difficult adventure in our world for things like social media or outreach. It feels like a huge disturbance, and it seems to somehow inhibit me from continuing my creative manuscript. Has anyone else ever felt that? Does anyone reading this find themselves sitting at home, a book in the works but no idea how to make it happen?

To anyone who will listen, I do have a word of advice. Whether you are writing fiction, non-fiction, blog posts, speeches, plans, outlines, and so on, there is one thing you never drop. There is one thing you never put down, for doing so would be quite unwise. In any step of this process, you are free and encouraged to utilize your creativity.

The creative process extends to so much more than writing a book, painting a picture, envisioning a scene, etc. The creative process is all of these endeavors, heavily employing writing, brainstorming, critical thinking and more, rolled into one evolving process. Through the creative process, you can take a brilliant adventure in a time and space of your own design. To make your project known to the world, you may embark on an adventure right here, in a world we all fondly share.

The creative process may propel you through all of this and more, you need only make the choice to exercise your creative thinking. That is the name of the game.