Hello friend, 👋🏾
I spent a lovely, sunny Mother’s Day with my mother, aunt, and cousins in what turned out to be a larger celebration than I’d originally expected. A lot of my writing is about characters seeking deeper connections and searching for home and family. I think these are things we all struggle with, so I want to express gratitude for days like yesterday. Because, as the following quote states, gratitude and optimism are inextricably linked.
"With gratitude, optimism is sustainable" — Michael J. Fox
📝 Growing Your Audience
Before I left Twitter, I noticed that the engagement and reach of my tweets had plummeted. It was one of the things that helped me decide that being on that platform wasn’t really serving me anymore. So how does a creator who wants to share their work with the world, but isn’t a natural at social media, build an audience?
Writer Tara McMullin addresses this in her post “What Can I Do to Grow My Audience?” She frames audience building as “legitimately interacting with others who share your interests and fostering mutual concern.”
The advent of social media and “influencer” as an occupation has only exacerbated the fact that so many relationships are transactional. So what’s the antidote to building relationships with an end goal in mind?
…audience-building, in my experience and observation, is much more like making friends. The relationship is the end—not what the relationship can get you. But when one makes friends in and around their career, business, or niche interests, those relationships tend to bear fruit.
McMullin says the key is to make remarkable work. This really aligns with something I heard author coach Becca Syme say recently, “Do less, but do it better.”
Social media is full of noise, so how can we create something authentic that stands out and actually attracts people to us?
When the focus is on not making things better per se but making them more interesting, it’s a lot easier to strike up the kinds of conversations (remarks) that lead to new friendships and deepen existing ones. And while that’s not exactly ‘audience-building,’ it’s the reason why many people have large audiences.
I like the idea of focusing more on remarkable work, being more authentic, and creating true connections. It may not be a sales strategy, but it feels like a better way to live.
📝 Becoming a Practical Creator
I highlighted so many quotes from this post “The Arc of the Practical Creator” by author and artist Lawrence Yeo on developing a creative career. It’s a fantastic and long article, so here were some of my highlights.
Yeo divides the creative career into three stages:
Prioritize Money - Working the day job to fund your creative endeavors.
The Great Plateau - Taking the leap partially or in-full into your creative career. It’s not paying (all) the bills yet, but you’re doing the dang thing.
Navigate the Creative Career - You’re finding success—either a little or a lot—and are becoming more confident.
As someone who splits her time between running a very “practical” business (web development) and writing fantasy and paranormal romance fiction, I related hard. One of my key takeaways was this line:
A Practical Creator doesn’t view a boring job as a dead-end endeavor, but as an active patron of their creativity.
Yes, your day job helps you to pay the bills, but sometimes it seems like a slog, and the pull to leave it and become a full-time writer beckons. However, I actually like my job. I enjoy the challenge of building websites, and I like not having to depend on my writing for all of my income. It frees me to make creative decisions I wouldn’t necessarily make if I had to feed the market in order to pay the mortgage.
Of course, being self-employed means I can take on only the projects I want to while I grow my writing business and career. Still, I often wonder if I should work harder to become a full-time author. And then there’s this:
We often think that you have to be an established creator to justify a creative career. But no one thinks that you have to be the CEO of a company to justify your career there. No, a career begins at the entry-level, from the moment you get compensated and recognized for your capacity to solve problems. If those conditions are satisfied (at whatever scale) and you are serious about improving yourself as a creator, then you have a career.
Carve out some time to read this post if you’re at all in flux about your creative career.
📝 Share the Love
This article by entrepreneur Derek Sivers is summed up very simply:
When you think something nice about someone, you should tell them.
Sivers gives a bunch of examples of how he put this into practice with all kinds of people from the famous and well-known to his friends, and it really aligns with the idea of gratitude and optimism that I’m embracing.
I was about to write that sending these sorts of gratitude notes may not live up to the level of “remarkable work,” however, I don't think that’s true. Maybe it’s just the kind of thing needed to create true relationships that aren’t merely transactional but lean more towards friendship.
If you’re enjoying this weekly email, would you mind leaving me a quick testimonial? It will only take a minute and would be much appreciated! Also, give it a ❤️ and share it with a friend!
💡Flesh Out Your Story Ideas
Where do you get your inspiration? That’s a question every author gets at one time or another. If you’re a writer who finds inspiration to be the easy part, but taking that spark of an idea and building it into an actual story, to be much harder, then you are exactly who I built the Story Seed Mini-course for.
This course offers a blueprint for setting a strong foundation for your story. You’ll learn my process for developing a story idea from the ground up with an accessible roadmap to navigate the often daunting path from concept to creation. If you've ever been stuck between inspiration and implementation, this mini-course is for you!
Included is a fillable PDF workbook, designed to guide you through the first phase of the story development process. You'll also receive an explainer video, where I delve into concrete examples from my own writing journey, demystifying the process and providing real-world context. Start the Story Seed Mini-course today!
🚀 Quick Bites
If you’re alway searching for information and inspiration like me, check out The Sample. When you sign up, you get a daily article from a random blog or newsletter that matches up with your interests.
If you’re a fan of positive affirmations, take a look at ThinkUp, a mobile app where you can record affirmations in your own voice. Even if you’re not a fan of the sound of your voice, it’s oddly powerful to listen to yourself building yourself up.
And if you find yourself in need of collecting testimonials, Senja offers a fast, easy way to do just that. You can even get video testimonials!
🎙️ My Imaginary Friends: Episode 217 Show Notes
The My Imaginary Friends podcast is a weekly, behind the scenes look at the journey of a working author navigating traditional and self-publishing, where I share insights on the writing life, creativity, inspiration, and this week’s best thing.
Watch on YouTube | Listen to the podcast
Mentioned:
Plottr software (affiliate link)
GMC: Goal, Motivation, and Conflict by Debra Dixon
Story by Robert McKee
The Story Grid by Shawn Coyne
Susan Dennard “How to Level Up Your Settings, Part 1”
Queen Charlotte on Netflix
Leap Year movie
Guardians of the Galaxy 3
SciFiTalk podcast with me and narrator Shayna Small
“Heal Chaos and Overwhelm: DECLUTTER Every Part of Your Life”
Thanks for reading! You can also:
Image caption: A mother otter and baby otter hugging on the banks of a purple river. —Canva text to image
Gratitude & Optimism
I wasn't sure how to respond to the pool, because I'm taking the leap, but my husband is supporting our family. While I'm extremely grateful that I don't have to worry about how much money I make from writing, I also find it a weird place to be in my career. The lack of stress to earn also means it sometimes doesn't feel like I qualify as a "real" author. Somehow it feels easier to say I'm a mom, because everyone understands that, but I keep the schedule of a working mom. But I would say I'm still in the R&D phase of my startup. ;-)
"A lot of my writing is about characters seeking deeper connections and searching for home and family. " Love that.