How well do you know yourself as a writer? Know how to motivate yourself, operate at your most productive, achieve your writing dreams? After all these years of writing about these exact topics I thought I knew myself pretty well.

Turns out that’s not true.

I’m taking a class called Write Better, Write Faster, about which I’ve already written. The whole point of it is to figure out how your brain works and thus how you can best put it to work. So far I’ve learned:

–I’m very externally motivated. Duh. I’ve always known I was deadline-oriented. And that if I make a commitment, I’ll follow through on it no matter what it takes. But I never extrapolated that to a bigger picture, or, um, to writing fiction. Class teacher Becca gently informed me that I need an accountability buddy for my writing. Something I have for my business, but not my writing. If I’m honest, its because I don’t place the same importance on my fiction because—baboom—its not a huge money maker.

–I need systems. I’m the loosiest, goosiest human on the planet.  Read this if you don’t believe me.  I need a system for editing, for instance, because otherwise I’ll get distracted and keep going back to the beginning, never getting anywhere. I have a great, never fail system for rewriting. I used to have a system for prepping for the novel, but I strayed from it—hence the multiple torturous rewrites of my most recent novel.

I share all this in case any of it resonates.  And to encourage you to learn all you can about yourself and your own writing style.  You can start by taking a watered-down version of the Meyers-Briggs test here.  We had a lot of fun with this on the Facebook group this week.

Any thoughts on how well you know or don’t know yourself as a writer? Leave a reply!

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