Tanya Lisle

  • I have known a lot of people who really want to get started with writing and want to make it a thing that they do regularly, but they just don’t know how to get into it regularly. It can be really hard to add a new habit to your day, though, and writing is especially tricky because it can also be very dependent on making sure there’s something to write when you do remember to do it.

    So here are a few ideas for finding a way to make writing a habit in your life.

    Set aside some time in your day dedicated to writing

    If you can, schedule a block of time for it. Figure out how long it takes you to get into a good rhythm and stay in it, and be sure to block about that much time a few days a week so that you can get a lot of words in every once in a while. But just to start, block off a little time every day to get started and get in the routine of it.

    Set a place

    In the same way, sometimes creating a dedicated space for writing can really help. Whether that is setting aside a different part of your room that is dedicated just for writing, or something that you can do to an existing area to change it to a writing space, it can really help to trigger the mindset and the habit if you have a dedicated area for it.

    Tell people about it

    A little social pressure can be just what we need, so long as it isn’t too judgemental! For some people, just knowing that other people know they were going to try and do this is enough to kick them into making it happen. The knowledge that they might be asked about it eventually means they will make sure they have an answer.

    Get a writing buddy

    Alternately, get a friend to join in! If there’s two of you working on the same goal, you can coordinate your schedules and meet up to get some writing done, get on a call to write at the same time, or just check in with one another to talk about what you’re working on to keep one another motivated.

    Find the time in odd places

    If you really look at what you do in a day, there might be a couple strange pockets of time that you can utilize to get some words in on a project. When I wor5ked downtown, I would be on transit twice a day for an hour each, so those two hours were dedicated to writing. I was able to make sure I always got a seat because of my schedule, and that might be something you can manage as well. If there’s a time where you’re waiting for something, or traveling as a passenger, you might be able to turn that into a writing session.

    Outline your work

    Sometimes the biggest hurdle to the habit is just not being able to figure out the words and what you need to happen. If you can create an outline for your work, or even spend a few of your writing sessions on creating that outline, that might help alleviate that issue because you’ll always know what needs to happen next.

    Habit tracking

    If you find that you’re just forgetting to do it, or you need to see yourself build that habit visually, try a using something like a habit tracker to help you to remember to do sit down and write. Whether that’s just a mark on a calendar, a page in a bullet journal, a sticker chart where you can add a sticker for every day you remember to do it, or an app like Habitica that can gamify the process, sometimes it’s good to be able to see progress in other ways than word count to stay motivated.

    Build in rewards for milestones

    Sometimes the fun of writing is not enough motivation, especially if you’re dealing with a lot of other things in your life or your story is just not cooperating with you. In these cases, you might want to try giving yourself another reward for not just finishing, but also for hitting milestones. I’ve used plot points in the past: When I get through a plot point, I’d earn a little treat for myself.

    And if you’re the kind of person who will just give themselves the reward without doing anything, you can do this with someone who can hold you accountable and let them be in charge of doling out the treats when you hit milestones.

    Do you have any other strategies for building a writing habit?

    Write Your Story: Unlock Your Creative Potential

    Are you ready to embark on a journey into the world of storytelling? Look no further! Introducing Write Your Story, a comprehensive resource designed to fuel your imagination, enhance your storytelling skills, and bring your characters to life. Whether you’re an aspiring writer, a seasoned author, or simply someone who loves crafting stories, this workbook is your ultimate companion.

    This Workbook Contains:

    • Story planning spreads
    • Setting and location spreads
    • Character spreads
    • Writing session tracker

  • I’ve been trying to read and be normal, but I read this while dealing with cognitive issues and after having failed to read a lot of other, more complex books. Like YA novels. But this was frames as a book about problem solving for adults framed around how children do problem solving, so I figured I could handle this one!

    And I finished it.

    The book really is just a walkthrough of problem solving techniques for business with pretty straightforward language and all of the examples are based around kids problems. It’s kind of amazing realizing how difficult some of these techniques are for people in business that I’ve worked with to grasp. Things like “Just ask your audience” and “Test a couple options” are amazingly foreign to a lot of the people I’ve worked with.

    It was exactly at the level that I could handle and it does provide a lot of great insight into how to do some preliminary research to uncover the reasons for a problem before jumping into finding and working out a solution. Just because you think you know does not mean you do, and it’s nice a pretty quick, easy read.

    If you’re having trouble with finding a solution to a problem you’ve been having for a while, or just want to do a book club book with some people at work who think they know exactly what is wrong and what will fix it, this might be a good one to pick up.

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  • I’ve been making a lot of updates to the shop and I’ve come to figuring out how to list and price the jewelry I’ve been making. Jewelry has been something I actually can work on while I’ve been recovering from the brain issues, but I have never been good at figuring out pricing, even when my brain was functioning properly.

    When I was able to do markets, I would sometimes ask the other vendors how to they figured out what to charge. Many of them were doing this in hopes of going full time, and it’s something I would like to look into eventually as well. They told me some variation of the same thing:

    You need to value your own time and charge properly for your work.

    It’s an idea I’ve been very resistant to. I’ve thought largely about making pricing competitively, and about only charging what I would feel comfortable with paying for an item myself. I’m someone who goes to multiple stores and tries to find a good deal or wait for a sale, so the lowest I could possibly go and just enough to cover materials and feel like it was correct for the item.

    But that’s also not how I shop markets. That’s not what I do when I am looking at handmade goods, at custom jewelry, at things I know that was made by a person and not a factory. And that’s helped to shift my mindset.

    I’m also very aware that, while none of them ever said anything about it, it was making things harder for everyone else around me. Undervaluing my own work can make everyone else look like they are overvaluing their own, especially if they have something similar or if someone with something similar comes in on a day I’m not there. It’s not good for anyone to do it.

    So I’ve taken a lot of the general feelings out of the pricing, stopped choosing numbers based on what feels like a good deal, and turned everything into a mathematical formula. There’s a spreadsheet, though I’m now also considering making this into a whole program for myself. Now if only I could get into some markets and see if it’s worked!

  • So I’ve had bad luck with business books that are recommended by CEOs and by the people I work for in general. So what about a business book about something that is pertains to something that has been a bit of a pain point and of particular interest to me?

    This book is almost entirely about something called OKRs: Objectives and Key Results. This is a pretty straightforward concept in terms of metrics that measure success. You decide on an objective (We are going to be the best at thing) and figure out what will happen in order for that to be true (NPS score you will hit (Do not ask me about NPS, I will rant at you for an hour), number of purchases, conferences attended, etc.) and then use that as a bit of a guide for the future. Everything you work on should be towards moving those numbers closer to success.

    I will admit that I read this in large part so that I could find something to throw at some of my coworkers who are a little new to the world of measuring success, and I think this is a nice foundational look at how OKRs could be used and integrated, as well as making the case of them being a successful methodology.

    And, you know, I can use them for some of that life stuff.

    It does absolutely make them seem like the only solution as opposed to part of a more robust strategy, but it’s a good starting point. Overall, good read, a lot better and significantly more practical than most business books out there.

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  • The question of pen names comes up when people are early in their publishing journey, as well it should! But it can still be a very difficult decision to make. As someone who started with a pen name and then switched to my real name, it can be a difficult choice to reverse. It’s gotten harder on some platforms over the years!

    So to help, I’ve put together a quick quiz to help you with the choice.

    [wp_quiz id=”7174″]

  • I’ve been needing some fiction after all those books that are supposed to be bettering myself and my life, so I managed to find something that sounded like something I would write. Hitman who is not a good person spared from death so that he could take over for the Grim Reaper while he takes a holiday? Well, maybe not a book I would write, but still very much in my area.

    This book follows Buck, a down on his luck average guy who also works as a hitman. He is set up on a job and ends up being spared from death by an overworked Grim Reaper and takes over trying to kill off the ones who refuse to die. In the process, he discovers the supernatural underbelly of Chicago and a civil war happening, as well as an adorable child who is definitely going to turn out to be dangerous.

    I think I needed this book right now. It was a fun, light, and generally entertaining read that I didn’t feel the need to take too seriously. No heavy subject matter, nothing too intricate, but definitely with a few fun twists here and there. The pacing was quick and I did enjoy how Buck was portrayed as not a dark and serious hitman, but a guy who did it as a job and spent the rest of his time playing D&D and generally getting into other geeky hobbies.

    Overall, it was a lot of fun! There’s not really a lot else to say. If it sounds interesting, it’s pretty quick of a read so check it out.

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    1. Revising my life
    2. My life as a research project: Discovery
    3. My life as a research project: Hypothesis and metrics
    4. My life as a research project: The first project

    Last time I got a whole bunch of ideas down and separated those into different key areas that I found important in life that I wanted to focus on. But there were a lot of items that fell into multiple different areas, so how did I deal with this?

    First off, I accepted that life is complicated and sometimes things aren’t neatly categorized. That’s just something that happens with life. But it also means that I get to possibly improve two things at once sometimes, which is always good!

    So with this in mind, I started brainstorming.

    The hypothesis

    Given that I had an idea of what would make my life amazing, I took these general ideas and started coming up with some hypothesis. Ideas of what I thought would make my life better if I did them, and made note of which areas these might fall into. They took the format of “I will be happier if” or “This will happen if” and I just wrote a bunch of them down.

    Some examples are:

    HypothesisAreas
    I get a restful night of sleep every night.Mental health, Physical health
    I have a plan for the day.Day to day life, Mental health
    My chores are done regularly and not forgotten about.Environment, Day to day life
    My mortgage is paid off.Money

    I’ve also made some notes about why these would improve my life, but I’m going to move on to the next key thing.

    How could I measure these?

    The metrics

    Something important about me is that I am not good at just sensing when something is improving. I am someone highly motivated by seeing numbers change and watching progress, so I knew I needed to have something to look at to determine if things were getting better.

    Some of these were pretty easy to find metrics for. How much is left on my mortgage? Did I create a plan for the day, yes or no? Pretty easy things, and there were pretty easy ways to track and measure these.

    Other things are not as clear. What counts as a restful night of sleep? Is that measured in hours? In how I feel in the morning? How easy it was to fall asleep? There’s a lot of factors, so I needed to brainstorm to come up with a bunch of them.

    And, because I know these numbers might change as I figure out if I’m even tracking the right things, I didn’t stress out too much about anything. I just tried to gather as many metrics as I could to track and then started to think of what should come next: Figuring out my baseline and coming up with my first project.

  • So work keeps recommending books. It has not had a great track record so far, but who knows, maybe the next one is going to be the one that I finally like, right? Right?

    Sigh.

    So this book is another one of those books that tries to give you simplified rules for life with a big emphasis of “You are only stressed because you choose to me” which is a lesson that seems to be very popular with these books. This one adds on a very heavy spiritual-not-religious-but-only-talking-about-Christianity angle and at one point mentions Buddhism in a way that makes it clear that the author knows nothing about Buddhism? It was off.

    I’m sure this kind of book is very useful and enlightening to some people. If it helps you to find peace in your life with just four questions, that’s fantastic. I am just ultimately not the demographic for this book, and I really need to stop taking book recs from CEOs.

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  • What is plotting?

    Plotting is a technique that some people use to help write their stories. This is where someone will sit down before they write and come up with an outline of what their story will be, giving them the chance to look at the structure of their stories beforehand, or to give them a roadmap of what’s to come so that they do not get stuck.

    If this sounds interesting to you, let’s get into some methodologies that people can turn to, from the most structured to the least.

    Save the Cat or Romancing the Beat

    If you really like structure, be sure to look up Save the Cat or Romancing the Beat, depending on what kind of story you want to write! These two methods will help you break your story down into arcs, sub-arcs, and in some iterations of them even down to what plot points need to happen on a chapter by chapter basis.

    Hero’s Journey

    This is a basic story arc for your character that can follow. This works best in stories in which you have a single focal character who is going through a change and has to learn and grow. It will help to give you a structure to how to format the narrative and when to put which obstacles, as well as when to lend your character a hand.

    Once you have that worked out, then you can break it up into chapters if that’s what works for you.

    Timeline

    A timeline plotting structure is a lot of fun for more complicated stories, often with many different things that have to be kept track of, such as a mystery or a thriller, or with multiple characters with overlapping and imperfect knowledge of events. This involves using something such as a spreadsheet or a calendar app and putting all of the events of your plot into it, moving those events around until they all make sense, then breaking up each plot point into a different chapter.

    Snowflake method

    This method starts with an idea that you can branch off from! One idea leads into the next and into the next in a giant mind map until, in the end, you have a story idea that looks a bit like a snowflake that you can then work into a plot. Often this is a method used as a starting point and the story you come up with becomes a plot structured in a different way, though I’ve known a few people who have used this as a means to figure out their entire series.

    Index cards

    This is one of my personal favourites and one with the absolute lease structure to it. Take every one of the ideas you have and put them all on different index cards. Things you want to have happen in the story, characters, everything. Once you have all the ideas down, start to rearrange all of those cards until it turns into something like a plot, adding and removing ideas as you go, storing some of them for later.

    What is your favourite method of plotting? Or do you plot at all?

  • Hey look, it’s a book that looks like it was written specifically for me! As someone who has absolutely zero chill and has had to force myself to chill out ((Chronic fatigue is awful)) this seemed like a good thing to look into. I’d like to know how to take it easy! It is not a skill I have!

    I’m pretty sure this book is just cognitive behavioural theory written in a cute and punchy format, though, which is ultimately not a thing that works well for me. The idea of “Slow down, realize that there’s nothing you can do about it, and let that emotion go” is just not something that clicks well in my brain and is not a practice I can really adopt.

    And the idea of logic-ing yourself out of stress is really the vast majority of the book, which made it a book very specifically not designed for someone like me. That is not to say it is a bad book, just that this was not a book that was ultimately for me. You may have better luck with it.

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