Power of Five Your Way to Success with Passion, Patience, Perseverance

The Writer, after accepting my “Power of Five” article in Quill, asked me to cut down the original from 1100 words to 700 words so it'd fit on one page, initially a chore but once I started chopping, the article vastly improved.  It’s punchier, to the point and a timely “action” reminder for Leap Year.  This idea came out of another Quill article "Small Increments, Big Results" that I wrote back in 2009, a good example of how one article can lead to another and then lead to another.

More importantly, the moment I sent this revised article off, I sent out five other articles/ideas to other editors and I plan to submit five more today after this blog.  As I wrote in the article “Enthusiasm . . . breeds discipline, and discipline—results.”   For me, as a writer, results are publications and paychecks.  But even a non-writer can benefit from the advice.  Just apply it to your own needs.  Good luck.   

Power of Five Your Way to Success with Passion, Patience, Perseverance  

 

"I'd rather be a failure at something I enjoy,” George Burns once said, “than be a success at something I hate."  This most definitely applies to writing.  To increase my chances of success, I’ve been putting into practice what I call The Power of Five, adapted from Jack Canfield’s Rule of Five, whereby each workday, I try to send out at least five submissions—short stories, articles, or query letters to editors and agents.

I’m creating a new habit of marketing what I’ve written on a consistent, persistent basis.  Five is all I ask.  By thinking small, those Power of Five submis­sions have been adding up to 100 per month (or 40 if you work weekends).  This is a far cry from my previous marketing habit of “whenever I get around to it”, whereby months, years would go by and hardly anything would be sent out.  Now I’m excited about the Power of Five, excited by the possibilities.

Enthusiasm, by the way, breeds discipline, and discipline—results.  What you sow, you reap.  I try to squeeze in a few before breaking for lunch . . . or before calling it a day, especially at the end of the month.  When I’m on a roll those numbers escalate.  Other days can be a struggle.

Once I made the Power of Five a habit, I committed myself to doing a daily double, by also advancing a major backburner project, even if only for an hour before going to bed.  By doing this day in, day out, for an entire month, every month, those months will add up to a highly produc­tive year.  That’s the goal.

The real reason I’m doing this is to face my fears (of writing and marketing) so I can tame it.  You can never truly eliminate fear, but you can keep it under control (a whip and chair also helps).  There’s a fine line between success and failure and that difference is often fear.  We fear, on a subconscious level, both success (all that hard work to get there and the pressure to stay there) and failure (being called a loser or a washed up writer).  That explains why we sometimes “drop the ball”.  Why we suddenly misplace important information that’s critical to our success (a document, an email contact), or procrastinate until the last moment, thus guaran­teeing a rush job, assuming we even complete it.  Or we make our­selves “too busy” to get around to the important career-defining stuff.

“Look at all that work piling up—I’m way too busy to write a book!”

Busy doing what?

These are self-sabotaging actions caused by our unconscious belief system that we “don’t deserve success”, or “that we’re not good enough” or we’re afraid we’ll be “exposed as a fraud”.  Who me?  A best-selling, award willing writer?  Ha! 

 

Writing can be scary, but the only way to overcome fear is to face it, acknowledge it, and do what you fear—write that book, contact that agent, market your work—and have faith in your own ability.

It all begins with passion!  If you don't have passion in what you do, you won't have the patience to complete it, nor the perseverance to see it through to its ultimate success.  This stuff is not easy, but it is doable.  For many writers it's routine.  It's all about your attitude, isn't it?

Besides, on the other side of that fear, on the other side of that self-imposed brick wall, is what you really want, right?  Fear never gets you anywhere.  It merely holds you back, paralyzes you into inaction.  So now I focus on what I want to achieve and give myself deadlines to accom­plish it.  I have faith that my passion, my patience, and my perseverance will see me through.

So what five submissions can you make today (or this weekend) that will take you a step closer to achieving your goals?  Write it down and take immediate action.  The longer you delay, the more you guarantee it won’t get done.  Again, it’s that underlying fear of success/failure that’s holding you back.  Do it now while the thought is there and Power of Five your way to success.

      —Borneo Expat Writer 

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Creative Writing Workshop—Torture or Fun? Quill Jan-Mar 2012

 

*Announcement latest workshops:  Writing Your Life Stories Workshop—Kuching! 23 June 2012 (with links to other workshops and writing tips!) and also a workshop KK on 17 June 2012!

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Creative Writing Workshop—Torture or Fun?

Creative Writing Workshop—three words that can send shivers down people’s spine!  Is it the word “creative” that scares you?  Often I’m told, “I’m not very creative,” and they cringe at the thought, as if being creative is an affliction akin to some tropical disease.  Or is it the thought of “writing” that's haunting you?  I know back in school the thought of writing was often equated with torture doled out by masochistic teachers bent on ruining our lives or at least killing a few of our precious weekends.  Then there’s the “work” part in workshop that doesn’t sound terribly exciting.  Who wants to pay good money to “work?”  There’s also the money issue.  In reality, though, who are you paying?

Yourself actually.

That’s right.  You’re paying yourself to show up for the workshop and invest your time to do something that you’ve been meaning to get around to for far too many years.  Ever since you’ve had that nagging idea that you want to write something, or that you have a story to tell.  It’s not necessarily that you want to be a writer, but just maybe you want to write about what happened to you a long time ago, something that changed you, made you a better person or a little wiser or a little more cautious or very grateful.  You've been thinking, if only I had the time.  The workshop will give you that time!

When people ask me, “Are you really going to make us work?”

I reply, “No, I’m going to make you play!”

Writing is playing with words, playing with ideas, playing with memories.  No one is asking you to write a masterpiece, let alone a book.  Just play with your ideas, play with the memories of the events in your life, the significant events that make you special.  That make you think.

“You mean I have to think, too?”

Relax, we have pre-writing techniques that will help you think, help you to remember, like clustering or mind mapping, or free writing.  Pretty soon you’ll have ideas gushing out of you, long forgotten memories from your childhood or when you were an awkward teenager.  Soon you’ll be recalling events in your life that you either learned from, that helped get you through a difficult time in your life, or maybe even some hilarious mishap that wasn’t all that funny at the time, but now looking back, it cracks you up just thinking about it.  At the very least, you survived it, or maybe even had the last laugh!

Or maybe you shared a special moment, something spiritual or even miraculous that you want to share with your friends, family, even the world.  The Chicken Soup for the Soul series is filled with such stories that move us in so many ways.  Many of those stories were first published elsewhere, like in your local paper, under the first-person or a nostalgic section where you get to write about what happened in those days long gone by…

Have you ever done anything interesting?  That’s what got me writing my first narratives that make up Tropical Affairs: Episodes from an expat’s life in Malaysia.   I was lucky enough to take part in some movies while living in Penang (Hollywood came to me!), so I wrote about my involvement.  Basically I narrated what I did.  Unlike writing the short stories in Lovers and Strangers Revisited, there were no inventing characters, creating scenes, or any plot developments.  This was relatively easy, straight forward.   

Then I started to look around my life to see what else I could write about.  Around that time, we had a baby, so I wrote about the silly things that our baby cum toddler did, and the silly things I did too as a new father.

I then wrote about my experiences being a teacher, being a writer, being an expat, being myself, and at times, being out of luck—my misadventures!   Misadventures, I soon learned pays really well.  When things go wrong and you can laugh at yourself over it, and if others can laugh and learn from it too—now that’s marketable.  I even published an article for Quill “Making Money from Your Mis-adventures” 

Just recently, to pick myself out of some doldrums, I did something rather fun, I compiled a list of my top 50 achievements.  Back in 2006, I compiled a list of 25 and expanded it to 50.  It really got me thinking about my life.  Try it!

Of course, another fear we all risk at writing workshops is being “exposed”, found out that our grammar is horrible!  Welcome to the club!  Everyone present feels the same way.  You are not alone.  Far from it.  When I decided to become a writer, I naïvely thought that being a native speaker, with a university degree and a fairly decent grade point average and even getting some of my early work published, that grammar came second nature to me—like breathing; that I didn’t have to even think about it.  So I didn’t. 

Then a well-meaning friend asked me if I’ve ever heard of the term “dangling modifier”?  

Vaguely, I did, though I had no idea what it was.  Curious, I looked it up.  Oh my god, I’ve been breaking that rule all my life!  I flipped through the grammar section of one of my English text books and found all kinds of interesting terms and rules that I shamelessly broke, not knowing they were rules!  Infinitives, anyone?  Surely my teachers weren’t that bad, or maybe, I got a little careless over the years like bad posture.  

Admitting my utter ignorance, I sucked it up and relearned some basic grammar.  You don’t have to know all the rules.  Grammarians don’t even agree on many of them.  Can you split an infinitive or not?  We can split an atom, but an infinite?  Well I do, when it serves my purpose.  Let the grammarians decide if I’m right or wrong.  All I want to do is tell my story.

For my Creative Writing Workshops, we don't focus on grammar.  That comes with revising, later. All I want to do is help you to write your own story, to help you get it out of your system onto paper, where you can play with it (I was going to say “work with it” but who wants to work?) and make it even better.  The more times you go over it, rewrite it, read it our loud, and keep smoothing out the wrinkles, the closer you'll be to getting it published—if you want to.  Not all workshop participants want to publish their work.  They get their pleasure out of merely writing it.

By the way, this is how all writing begins; a writer gets an idea, plays with it, writes it down, and voila!  They’ve written something.  It may not be a masterpiece (that may come later, after they revise it over and over, or get some editing help) but it’s a start, and getting started on your idea, your very own idea based on your very own personal experiences, is why you should attend a creative writing workshop.  Besides, you might even have some fun (and meet some kindred spirits who never realized writing was so much fun either).  You might even at admit, at least to yourself, that you actually like writing, and that you got something to show for the time (and money) spend at the workshop.  If not a complete first draft, something well underway that you can finish off when you get home. And if you sell it, you could recoup your investment!  Who knows, you might even turn your idea into a book!  

And all those years, you thought writing was torture.  Shame on you!

*Announcement latest workshops:  Writing Your Life Stories Workshop—Kuching! 23 June 2012 (with links to other workshops and writing tips!) and also a workshop KK on 17 June 2012!

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Blog to Paying Article—Twice

I love getting good news early in the morning, which is how I usually get them since in Borneo we’re a half day ahead of the West.  One of my blogs just sold for the second time!  This is one of the reasons I blog, so I can get some stuff written, posted, and then the marketable ones that can be reshaped into articles, I send them out to a paying market, over here in Malaysia for starters, and then I’ll either expand or compress it for the overseas market.  

I blogged about The Power of Five back in September, which ran for 771 words, then I rewrote it and expanded it for Quill for their January-March 2011 issue, about 1050 words. Now The Writer wants me to compress it 700 words to make it fit onto one page to be published sometime in the future.  It could be a while before it actually comes out. 

Still it’s a nice feeling, and a nice reminder that my ideas not only works for me, which I practice in my own writing life (or at least try too, the very reason I post them so they’ll also benefit others and remind me to continue to do this since it works!), but also for editors in Malaysia and in the United States who feel that those ideas will work for their readers, too.   

This has happened several times now, a double publication from a single blog posting.  Sometimes the order is reversed.  First it appear in the US, again The Writer, like “Getting Started with Pre-writing Techniques” in their May 2010 issue, and then reprinted for Quill Annual 2011, both of which I then post as a blog.  This particular article began when I created my teaching units for my creative writing class, and then made its way to my website, if I’m not mistaken, and both of these have been popular among writers and even cited by other writers.

Again, this is why I blog.  There are other reasons, too, but I’ll save those for future blogs.  

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists, blogged and then published:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Getting Started with Pre-Writing Techniques - Quill Annual 2011

This is a revised, expanded version of last year's article in The Writer.
Note for Illustration 1, circles should be used, not squares.

****Announcement latest workshop:  Writing Your Life Stories Workshop—Kuching! 28 April 2012 (with links to other workshops and writing tips!) 

If you are interested to bring one of my writing workshops to your organizations or association in Sabah/Sarawak/West Malaysia/Singapore/Brunei please contact me at robert@borneoexpatwriter.com  Thank you.

*Update, the 20th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I

Power of Five Your Way to Success- Quill Jan-Mar 2011

 

*Here's the updated, trimmed down version, cut from 1100 words to700 at the request of a writing publication in the US.

**Update, the 20th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

Get Started with Prewriting Techniques -The Writer - May 2010

*Update, the 20^th anniversary of Lovers and Strangers Revisited 

Here are links to some of my author-to-author interviews of first novelists:

Ivy Ngeow author of Cry of the Flying Rhino, winner of the 2016 Proverse Prize.

Golda Mowe author of Iban Dream and Iban Journey.

Preeta Samarasan author of Evening is the Whole Day. 

Chuah Guat Eng,  author of Echoes of Silence and Days of Change. 

Plus:

Five part Maugham and Me series

Beheaded on Road to Nationhood: Sarawak Reclaimed—Part I 

The Writer – Four Years to Publication!

Funny how these publishing things turn out. Nearly five years ago, 27 January 2006 according to my records I received the good news that The Writer has accepted by article “How to Overcome the Fear of Writing through Pre-Writing.” Originally they weren’t sure if they’ll be using the piece in their magazine or on their website. Then they decided in the magazine and even paid $350 for the article on 26 May 2006, bless their hearts.

I told my writing friends to look out for it, but it never came out. Maybe they decided to use it on their website, but I got caught up in more important things, like this massive move from Penang (Peninsular Malaysia) to Kuching (Borneo) in October, a new teaching job at Unimas in December, and a new baby in January 2007 and never checked, after cashing the check. If I wasn’t paid, I would have been checking it constantly!

Month after month, year after year, I did check each issue of The Writer. During that time they also changed editors, and I’ve experienced being lost in the shuffle before when a new editor takes over. It happens. Sometimes I’ve even benefited when a new editor takes over and they discover me! Eventually, I just gave up on it – after all, I did get paid!

Two days before Christmas I got an email from one of their editors informing me that they’ll be using my article in their May 2010 issue! Nearly four and a half years after they first accepted it! Of course I’m bowled over. Great news! The original article, adapted from my creative writing units, was about 2500 words, which I had cut down from about 4000 words) and then they’ll be cutting that down to 1695 words to make it fit on two pages, which is fine since it serves their needs.

Two days ago I got my first look at how they edited it, now titled, “How to Use Pre-Writing Techniques to Get Started”. I didn’t compare it the original because that's always a painful process. So I read it as it’ll appear in The Writer. Naturally I recognized my own writing (but had forgotten what I had written!). I know of at least one section that got lopped off at the end, an essay sample on how to overcome the fear of writing written within the article. I did recommend a couple of changes because of repetition, which may have been in the original version, and they suggested another change, too. Later I’ll get to see the galleys before it goes into print, glad for this second chance, glad to have another look at it.

In the brief bio at the need of the article they’ll be naming my two MPH books and my website, and no doubt I’ll attract something good out of that. Already I’ve mentioned three other articles that I’m planning to send them, two of which began in this blog and a third, from The Quill, linked here, too.

So now I’m telling my writing friends all over again to check out their May 2010 issue! I definitely will! It feels like a whole new article sale. What are the chances that they'll pay me again? Hey, you never know. It's a New Year!