Expectation

Celebrating the micro wins that build your writing career ~

Small progress creates big change - Image via Unsplash

By Lindsey Vernon

I want you to take about ten seconds, right now, to think of your recent writing accomplishments and the progress of your writing career. Don't write anything down. This is merely food for thought.

Pause ~

Resume~

While you were thinking, how many times did you say phrases like:

Writing accomplishments?

I haven't published anything...

Well, I only have ___ to show...

I still have to...

I just started...

I have so much more work to do before...

I still need to figure out...

What writing career?

I'll guess with confidence you told yourself, at least, two of these. Wave hello to your negative writer self-esteem. We can acknowledge this is our go-to protective mechanism, especially when we're asked these questions in public and trying to save face. However, I urge you to think about how this recurring, dismissive self-talk:

{1} significantly hinders your ability to produce high quality work you're proud of

{2} actually encourages others to dismiss you as a serious writer

Let's do this thought exercise again, this time using positive language that celebrates even your smallest wins.

Pause ~

Resume~

Speak three of these accomplishments, out loud. Now, give yourself a "Woohoo" and round of applause. You're doing great and have accomplished great things! Be proud!

Despite what we often tell ourselves, writing is not "Everything, all at once." Yet, we talk ourselves out of doing the work because we "have to write an entire novel...write 1,000 words a day...figure out the story lines for six characters in a play." Instead, I like to write how I clean my house...one item at a time...one word at a time. I refer to this as micro writing like micro cleaning. As a person with anxiety and depression, micro anything is sometimes the only way I can function and reach my larger goals.

Try this the next time you feel too overwhelmed or do not know where to begin:

Identify the micro manageable parts of your work. Before you open any project, spend twenty minutes journaling which top three projects hold the highest value (and I don't mean monetary) for you. This usually conflicts with what you think should be the priority.

Trust the value-based process, and one project will float to the top of your list. Spend a few minutes deciding which micro parts of that project you can work on that day. Can you edit a paragraph, write a 100-word flash scene, or tighten a page of dialogue? Set a five-minute timer and let that be your only goal. Over time, you'll have developed that micro writing muscle to build to ten, twenty minutes, an hour, two hours.

Now, on to the harder part of this conversation: recognizing your worth and celebrating your wins. We're conditioned to dismiss micro progress as "not real writing" or our career journey as "not a real author until someone else publishes me," but every published author built their work one word at a time, one win at a time. And let's not discount the loads and loads of words you have already put to paper or the hours upon hours of craft study and genre reading you have dedicated your life to.

That paragraph you revised? It counts. The character detail you discovered in five minutes of writing? It counts. The day you chose to write instead of scroll through social media? That especially counts. Progress isn't measured in word count or completed manuscripts. It's measured in showing up and moving the work forward, no matter how incrementally.

When you shift from asking, "Did I finish?" to "Did I progress," you'll find that you've been succeeding far more often than you realized.

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What small writing victory have you dismissed lately that actually deserves recognition? Sometimes our most important progress happens in moments so quiet we forget to notice them.