Lorna Faith

Clean Fiction Author

3 Benefits of Accountability Groups for Writers

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There are amazing benefits and reasons for writers to be part of an accountability group.

One of my biggest lessons learned this past week, was that it’s amazing how much you can get done, just by being part of a support group that encourages you but also keeps you accountable to your goals.

Somewhere in my head I knew I needed accountability, but it took days and weeks of finally being frustrated enough – of not reaching my writing goals – to force me to take the next step… which was to reach out to other writers and ask for help 😉

It sounds simple, but it’s not easy. Asking for help is hard for many of us to do, I think.

I was inspired to start an accountability group from the last coaching call I had with Nina Amir in her High Performance Writers Group Coaching. So at the end of last week, I posted in Facebook in one of the writing courses I’m taking, telling other romance writers that I was struggling with getting my word count in each day.

When I reached out to other writers, I was hoping for maybe 2 or 3 other writers to join me and was surprised when that number more than tripled.

We had our first 60 minute meetup – via Facebook group and messenger – on Friday. Each of us let each other know where we were at with our writing, talked about what was working and what wasn’t and then toward the end of our chat we wrote down what our goals were for the coming week.

Scary? Definitely yes.

But I knew this was exactly what I needed and I wasn’t going to let my own fears and limiting beliefs in my abilities or whatever else, to hold me back. I had finally had enough and was ready to run.

This week there have been many lessons learned in writing and in being a part of an accountability group, which I share below…

3 Benefits of Accountability Groups for Writers

I realized this past week, that it’s so incredible and helpful to have writers surround you who are listening to you, offering advice and most of all cheering you on.

Since I started last Friday(the 1st time we met as a group), I have so far written a little over 6000 words in 5 days. I’ve really surprised myself, but most of all I feel encouraged and inspired to keep writing.

Here are 3 Benefits for writers when they are part of an accountability group:

1.You know you aren’t struggling alone. When you’re really struggling with writing that blogpost, novel or nonfiction book, it helps to know that you’re not alone. When another writer lets you know that they’ve struggled too with reaching their goals, you feel like you’re not alone and it makes reaching your goal seem much more doable. When you are trying to finish your book, knowing you aren’t alone, somehow makes getting that first draft done, less daunting.

2.You learn from others in the group. In the writer’s group chat last week, I was busy soaking in all the tips from indie romance writers who had written and sold many books. They shared what worked and what didn’t as far as marketing and productivity. It’s so great to learn from other writer’s success and also be challenged to keep going when you feel like you aren’t reaching your goals.

3.You can encourage others and you are encouraged in return. Maybe they’ve tried a new way of writing or are writing in a new genre that they are excited about and it is selling well. You can encourage them and add value to their lives.  At the same time, you can also be challenged with your own writing. Or maybe someone will say how they had all these crazy things happen in their lives this past week and they still continued to write. I feel inspired to keep going when I hear stories like that.

There are also other benefits of being in an accountability group, like reaching your deadlines and having people to celebrate with you. I’m shooting for hitting my writing goal by Friday!

I hope you find this post useful to you. Maybe you’ve been inspired to start an accountability group of your own… that would be amazing! You might just be surprised, like I was, at how many other writers are in need of the support of other writers so they can accomplish their goals.

Are there other benefits that you would add for writers to be part of an accountability group?  Please share your ideas in the comments below, we can learn from each other 🙂

7 Ways to Reignite Your Passion for Writing

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You have a dream to be a writer.

But maybe somewhere along the way, you gave up because the not-so-pleasant part of life happened. Life threw too many curve balls that upset your world and you felt like you struck out.

Maybe fear or worry inched it’s way into your life, sucking away your passion for writing.

And now you feel listless and sluggish not sure how to move forward.

Now you’re unsure how to get back that excitement you once had for writing. You’ve tried and failed to reignite that spark that seems to be lost.

Maybe you’re like me and you want to find the wonder, passion and joy that creating something new in the world brings to you.

If that’s you, I want to help bring the spark back today. You don’t have to give up. You don’t have to let go of your writing dreams. You don’t have to settle for less.

There is hope for your writing, hope for your creativity and hope for your dreams.

Read on to discover 7 ways how you can reignite your passion for writing again…

7 Ways to Reignite Your Passion For Writing

I wanted to share with you what has helped me to re-connect with my passion for writing again.

It’s been a seriously tough last couple of months or so and I feel like just in the past couple of weeks, I’ve started to rediscover my passion for writing and storytelling.

So, if you need a little inspiration to help you stick with it, the follow 7 ways are what have helped me.

1.Reconnect with your Big Why. It’s super important to write down why you want to write in the first place. It’s been shown by studies that writing down your goals and/or dreams helps to reinforce them in our minds.

Give yourself permission to write down whatever reason for writing that comes into your mind. There’s no judgement here and no wrong answer. Whatever your reason is for writing and telling stories that compels you, let that pull you forward.

Maybe you want to earn a living writing. Or perhaps you want to be able to make money to save for your kids college education. Maybe for you, there’s a story inside of you that keeps you awake at night, compelling you to put words on the page.

I’ve been re-writing my big why down in my journal in the past few weeks, and it really has given me clarity. I want to write novels as well as nonfiction books and make a full-time income from it.

2.Read/Listen/Watch what inspires your writing goals and dreams. I believe creatives need to be inspired on a regular basis. For myself, I need to either read or listen to something that helps me step beyond my self-doubts and into belief, every single day. For example, when I listened to this YouTube video on Getting What You Want, by Oprah, and was reminded that if you have faith as a mustard seed you can move mountains and anything is possible.

As I watched this video, I was reminded of when I was ten years old. My mom gave me a necklace with a mustard seed, in a little clear box and said Lorna Faith, this is for you. Think of your name [Faith] every time you wear it. It’ll help you get past your mountains. And someday I know you’ll encourage others to have faith when things look impossible. 

This was a great reminder to keep going after my dream of writing. I hope it helps you too and that you find blogposts, books, audios or videos that inspire you to keep telling your stories too.

3.Talk about your dreams with a loved one. This is so good. I share constantly(probably too much), with my hubby and sometimes my kids, the books I’m writing – and my ideas and goals, what I’m blogging about or the very fun chats I have with so many amazing authors. They tell me it inspires them to go further with their own dreams too.

Sharing your dream with people who love and believe in you, empowers and motivates you.

4.Speak out loud your goals and affirmations. I started doing this on a regular basis around the start of 2017, and it has helped me stay motivated and focussed. I learned this in the awesome book Miracle Morning for Writers by Hal Elrod, Steve Scott, and Honoree Corder. I’ve also learned how a focussed morning routine that includes affirmations, increases your productivity and income.

So instead of saying words like:  I can’t; I shouldn’t; or this won’t work – change those words to – I can; I should try this; it will work. You’ll start to be amazed how it begins to change your perspective about yourself and your writing.

5.Go for a walk in nature or visit a museum or other places that inspire you. Take a little bit of time to go on an Artist Date. Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way, encourages creatives to go once a week to someplace that inspires you(museums, craft stores, walking in nature), fills the creative well of your inner child. I go for walks by the lake or sometimes a take 30 minutes to visit to the craft store, which gives me many ideas for stories.

6.Stay Connected with Other Writers. This is something that is really helpful. I have quite a few writing groups that I love to connect with and share ideas on. Some are in courses that I’ve taken like Tribe Writers and others. But, a group for indie writers that isn’t from an online course, that is super helpful to anyone wanting to write and self-publish their books, is Susan Kaye Quinn’s For Love or Money FB Group.  There are a ton of great ideas that get shared in this group and people are more than willing to help. Just ask to join and you’re good to go!

7.Make a list of all the things you love. I find that thinking of and writing down what I love, helps to inspire me. Go to places like Pinterest, Instagram or just google a topic that really interests you. Often I’ll go to Pinterest and look for pictures, which gives ideas for my characters or for some next scenes. It’s really quite fun how ideas just pop in your head as you’re researching stuff. So make a list of things that you love and then do more research on them. You might be surprised at ideas you get from it!

So, I hope this list has helped to reignite your passion for writing. I practice doing most of these ideas every week, and it keeps me grounded and focussed. I hope it does the same for you and that you stay focussed and inspired on your writing dreams 😉

What inspires or reignites your writing dreams? Please share. I’d love to hear your ideas in the comments below. Let’s learn from each other!

3 Steps to Start Tiny Habits that Help You Reach Your Goals

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When you start Tiny Habits in your writing life, it helps you reach your goals faster.

What are Tiny Habits? Dr. BJ Fogg – a Behavioral Scientist and originator of the term – says that a Tiny Habit is when you do something very, very small. Like floss one tooth, do two pushups or drink one sip of water. In his inspiring TEDx talk – Forget Big Change, Start With One Tiny Habit – BJ Fogg shares tips on how you can change your behavior for good.

Let me share with you what I’ve learned…

3 Steps to Start Tiny Habits…

I’ve needed to get out of what has seemed like a pattern of fear and procrastination. I felt like I was in Psychology 101 again, but this time I was Pavlov’s dog stuck in a repeating habit pattern.

Here’s what I’ve been learning and have come to realize about myself: Fear can be a habit. Left unchecked, fear can become a unconscious loop that goes round and round in our heads.

Many of our habits get triggered by things outside of us(smell, sounds, etc.). Each trigger in your brain results in a behavior and every behavior results in a reward. From a neuroscience perspective this is called a Habit Loop.

In other words, chances are very high that the fears holding you back from achieving your goals are possibly 10, 20 or even 30 years in the making. These fears have become a unconscious pattern that repeats itself over and over again.

Most of the time we have these fears and don’t know how to get out of it, which has definitely been my struggle. I had a elementary school teacher who told me that my writing was like chicken scratchings, and since he was the teacher I respected his opinion. I believed and accepted his words to be truth.

Since that time(many years ago), I’ve literally struggled and battled everyday to get words on the page. I’ve worked hard to push past resistance that showed up in the form of my inner critic. My negative habit loop has gone something like this: my writing isn’t good enough; nobody will read my books; maybe I should quit now, I’ll most likely fail anyway…. and much more.

I’ve had to consciously work toward getting out of this destructive habit loop.

Fear – whether conscious or unconscious – causes you to procrastinate and stops you from achieving your goals.

I didn’t want to continue to let procrastination or fear win, so in the last few months I’ve been learning more about how to get rid of both. 

I have taken steps to understand how to change my unhelpful habit loop. I’ve been choosing everyday to take work on Tiny Habits, and it’s been so encouraging. I hope it helps you too.

Here are 3 Steps to Start Tiny Habits that Help You Reach Your Goals:

1.Take a sheet of paper and write down One Fear you realize that has been holding you back from reaching your goals. Write down whatever the biggest fear is for you that you feel stops you from achieving your goals. For example: For this step I wrote down my #1 fear: I have a big fear that my writing won’t be good enough and that readers won’t want to read my romance novels. 

2.Write down One Tiny Action that you can take immediately – in the next 24 hours – that will move you AWAY from the fear you have and TOWARDS the goal you want to achieve. Think about a tiny step you could take that would move you in the direction of your goal.  Since my big fear has been that my writing won’t be good enough, it has caused me to procrastinate on writing my romance novels.

For example: My One Tiny Action that I’ve chosen to work on, is to write 250 words every single day – without judging my words, and writing those words wether I felt like writing or not. I’ve chosen to just do it.

Also, don’t forget to Celebrate your One Tiny Action 🙂

3.After you have done that One Tiny Action for 7 days, then ADD One More Tiny Habit to your daily goals. Just add something really small to the habit you’ve already started developing in your life. For example: When these 7 days are finished I will add another 250 words to the words I’m already writing everyday.

That’s all there is to it. Simple right?

Some Keys to Remember with Habits.

  • You can stack Tiny Habits on top of each other.
  • What puts most people in the fight, freeze or flight mode is when they think of the Big Goal and they think of all the things they have to do – and then feel overwhelmed. When we feel overwhelmed, our brain switches to fear of success, fear of failure, fear of embarrassment, fear of shame, etc.
  • What will happen as you build these Tiny Habits, is that you’ll start to become a person who feels the emotion of fear and then you take a little action anyway towards what you want to achieve.

Remember: Everyone feels fear. It’s normal. It’s how you handle it and what you do with that fear that matters. So take one small step anyway, when you feel fear.

You’ll be amazed and what happens as you take action on One Tiny Habit for 7 days. I hope you’ll be so inspired by your results, that you’ll want to repeat the process for another 7 days, and so on.

What’s One Tiny Habit you can begin in the next 24 hours that will move you toward your goals? Please comment, I’d love to hear your thoughts!

7 Big Reasons to Finish Writing Your Novel

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When we’re in the middle of writing our story – still trying to find our rhythm – it’s too easy to give up.

As we near the finish line of our work in progress, writing can feel as painful as a visit to the Dentist.

Sometimes we want to abandon our novel completely, but there’s still a part of us that feels compelled to keep writing.

We have all these doubts and questions and we wonder if we should quit now while we’re ahead. But sometimes in these moments, we remind ourselves that if we do quit, most likely we’ll regret at some point later in life.

Writing fiction, isn’t easy.

So why finish your novel at all?

Why you should keep writing…

I’ve had many moments of frustration as I’ve been writing my current novel.

I’ve really struggled with my story. Some of the plot points in the story structure, didn’t seem to ring true to the rest of the story I was telling.

It was incredibly frustrating and many times I wanted to give up altogether.

After talking about the story – out loud – with my husband(asking questions, focusing on theme and characters), many of the foggy parts of the story cleared up for me. It really helped a lot.

If you’re struggling to finish your story, try something new like asking your characters deeper questions or maybe try what I did and ask your spouse, children or a friend if you can talk your story out loud to them. It worked wonders for me.

It’s really difficult when you struggle for a few days or weeks with your story. You start to question whether you’ll ever figure it out and you start to question whether you should finish writing your book at all.

I get it. That’s where I was these past couple of weeks. That’s why I wrote this list of reasons why it’s a good idea to finish your book – I hope some of these ideas will inspire you too:

1. You Love to Write Fiction. For most of us, there are a bunch of activities that we have to do – like going to work; taking out the garbage – and there’s not so many things we do that we choose to do for fun.

It’s great to have a few things in your life, that you do just because you love it. If writing for you is one of those things you love to do, then keep writing… and finish your book. If writing your stories makes you happy and more alive, that’s an amazing gift to embrace.

2. You will stretch and grow as a writer. To write a really good novel, there are many details to get good at. For instance, you need to be able to see the big story, break your story down into story structure and learn your characters arcs.

But, as you keep learning, you become a better writer. That really is an added benefit of being committed to finishing your novel.

3. You learn more about yourself as You write your novel. This was a surprise to me, as I wrote my first novel. I didn’t realize I would have aha moments about myself, but I did.

Most likely you’ll find as you think deeper about your story, that you’ll find new ideas, emotions and beliefs. As you write, you’ll see that the themes, characters and circumstances you explore in your novel, help you understand yourself and your own life in a new way. This can help you understand more of who you are and who you want to become.

4. You can reach people on a deep level with fiction. Ever since I started reading fiction during my childhood years, I discovered that fiction short stories or novels had the power to reach me in a way a nonfiction book never would. I love that about storytelling.

There’s been many novels whose characters and their lives have stuck with me for years. Maybe you’ve experienced that too? Fiction stories and their characters have the power to get deep into the reader’s heart and mind and engage them in a really deep and lasting way.

5. You are empowered and given control as a self-published author. Since ebooks and print-on-demand have revolutionized the publishing industry, you don’t have to wait for an agent or publisher any longer. You don’t have to spend months or years trying and hoping to get published any more.

Instead you can give yourself permission to write the novel you love and publish your novel onto digital retail stores as soon as your book is finished.

Of course, you can choose to traditionally publish if you want, because being an indie author isn’t for everyone. But the great thing is you have the option now.

You can be confident that you’ll be able to get your novel into the hands of readers.

6. You will develop great time management, self-motivation, planning and goal-setting skills. It takes a little bit of planning to schedule in time to finish your novel. Whether you take 30 minutes writing while you’re riding the bus home, or whether you go sit in your closet and write for an hour, it means you’ve chosen to put the time in to write your book. By continuing to write your novel until you type “the end” you prove to yourself that you can motivate yourself to keep going even when the going is tough.

You also use your planning skills when you organize your ideas into chapters and plan all your characters and where each of them fit into your story. You also learn goal-setting when you choose a date for when you want your book to be finished. Then all you do is figure out how many words you need to write each day to hit your target word count.

All these skills are great to develop. Many people spend a lifetime struggling to develop these skills. Writing a book, helps you jump in with both feet to improve all these skills as you write each day, and you can then take what you’ve learned into other areas of your life as well.

7. You might just change your life and step into work you’ve dreamed of doing. If you don’t write your novel, you might regret it later in life. If you don’t finish what you started, you’ll never know what might have been. If you don’t share your words with the world, you don’t know if it would have touched someone, somewhere, or if it might have been a best selling book or perhaps your novel would have been start for you to step into your new career as a full-time writer.

Be brave and confident that you can do this. You will finish your book. Then ten or twenty years down the road you can look back with no regrets and see what you’ve created and achieved as a writer.

Today, choose to make time for your novel…. even if it’s only 15 minutes. Go back through your outline, character sketches or your first few chapters and re-read what you’ve written. Begin to write from where you left off last time.

Make a commitment today.

I will finish writing my book!  😉

 

What are your reasons for finishing your novel? Please share your thoughts in the comments below, I’d love to hear from you!

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