11 Tips to Build your Career as a Writer, Artist or
Other Creative Professional
If you have a hard time motivating yourself to build your career as a writer, artist or other creative professional, keeping a
progress log can help you move toward achieving your dreams.
Writing down your goals, the steps you take to accomplish them and the result of each action, not only keeps you accountable, it provides you with an important record for future planning. It also keeps you from having to remember everything. Start with an inexpensive spiral notebook that you’ll devote exclusively to your career-building efforts.
1. Write a Mission Statement.
Before you even think of jotting down to-do lists, begin by creating a mission statement – a one-sentence summary of your overriding reason for doing what you’re doing. The best mission statements are short, simple, and reflect your core values. Even if it takes you several days to come up with a statement you feel truly reflects your purpose, that’s time well spent. Clarity about why you want a creative career keeps your energy and your actions focused.
2. List Your Major Goals Toward Manifesting this Mission.
Do you want to write and publish a book? Exhibit your paintings in a local gallery? Mount a one-person show? Get a lead role in a movie? Write it down.
3. Prioritize.
You many have more than one objective. If this is the case, take the time to decide which are the most important to you and which you want to accomplish first. Those are the ones on which you’ll want to focus most of your energy. (Using different colored ink for each goal can help you keep them straight.)
4. Break Big Goals Down into Sub Goals.
If you want to write and publish a book, you’ll need to come up with an idea, you’ll need to research the idea, research the competition, possibly write a proposal and find an agent or a publisher, or alternately, create your own self-publishing and marketing plan. These are sub goals. Give each sub goal at least one page in your notebook.
5. Break Sub Goals into Baby Steps.
Working from a list of sub goals is a sure way to overwhelm yourself and stop your progress before it starts. Devote at least one page to each sub goal and take the time to list every step necessary to make it happen. For example, researching the market for book ideas involves checking Books in Print, looking through books at libraries and bookstores, looking at trends in Publishers Weekly and determining what publishers want.
6. Be Specific and Quantify Your Baby Steps.
Instead of setting down the task “browse bookstores,” a step that could theoretically take forever, give yourself instructions to “browse the psychology sections of Boarders, Barnes and Nobel and Amazon to make a list of books similar to the one I want to write.” Or, if you are an artist, create a list of five gallery owners to approach about showing your work, vs. simply noting that you should “talk to gallery owners.” The more specific you can be, the better your chances are of accomplishing what you want to do.
7. Set Deadlines.
Set target dates for reaching your major goals and the sub goals that lead up to them. Once you’ve done that, set realistic times for accomplishing the baby steps on your to do list.
8. Be Flexible.
At the same time you work to meet these self-imposed deadlines, allow yourself some flexibility. If someone has already written a book so similar to the one you planned to do, you’ll need to begin coming up with ideas again. If none of the five gallery owners will talk with you, you’ll need to backtrack to expand your list. Set new deadlines in your progress log to reflect the changing circumstances.
9. Begin Today.
Even if you’re pressed for time, you can look in the phone book or do quick internet searches for the information you need to put your plan in action. You can sit at the computer for 20 minutes to begin drafting a letter to a contact on your list. If baby steps take hours and hours to accomplish, they’re not baby steps. Break them down further.
10. Keep a Daily Record of What You Did.
If you went to the office supply store to get paper, that counts. If you read a professional magazine or painted for an hour, or made a marketing-related phone call, those count as well. Annotate these records with their outcome and what you learned by taking the action. (This is also a great time to jot down sudden inspirations, or names, phone numbers and addresses of potential contacts or markets.)
11. Return to Your Daily Record to Jot Down Results.
If you take these steps, you will start seeing unexpected patterns emerge.
Bonus Step: Secure an accountability partner (a friend or professional coach) to help you stay motivated, stay on task, and meet your timelines.
Rita Milios is available for one-one coaching/mentoring to help you attain your creative goals. Call 863-496-7223 to discuss how creative coaching/mentoring sessions work.