Recently I started a new (day) job. I was really excited, so in anticipation of the new position, I read The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins. The book basically outlines a set of strategies to ensure the reader is on the track to success from day one.
As I read it, I realized—despite its corporate/management focus, some of Watkins' tips are applicable to writing projects as well!
Photo by Edward Liu
Promote Yourself
Every writer needs a platform. Tell people what you’re working on. Give drafts to your friends and family to read. Blog. Promote.
Accelerate Your Learning
Whether you’re writing your first novel or your tenth, you’re going to face a new challenge. Don’t just stumble through the learning curve, take control! Does your character have a profession you know nothing about? Start interviewing! First time doing a creative writing project? Sign up for a writing class!
Match Strategy to Situation
In the book, the author discusses the importance of correctly identifying the situation when starting a new job. One’s approach to a start up, for example, should be different from her strategy for a company in desperate need of a turnaround.
There is a lot of advice out there for writers. Before embarking on a strategy, make sure you have correctly identified your situation. Are you really a novice, or actually an experienced writer trying out a new style? Writing genre fiction? Then maybe you should read up on the rules your novel should follow.
7 More Tips
In The First 90 Days, Watkins goes through ten different strategies, which is too many to get into detail here. However, they are still useful to consider in this context:
- Secure Early Wins
- Negotiate Success
- Achieve Alignment
- Build Your Team
- Create Coalitions
- Keep Your Balance
- Expedite Everyone
PRACTICE
Take fifteen minutes to write about someone entering into a new experience. Share with us below!
Very nice article. Thank you. Art imitates life which imitates art. Every day is a new experience. If I pay attention, both on and off the job, all experiences can be grist for the mill. 🙂
Well said, Dawn! 🙂
Sheila started sweating profusely waiting for the class to officially start. This was the first
time she would be standing in front her peers facilitating a professional development
seminar.
Sheila wasn’t the official trainer. She had a desk job that she liked, and was even the subject matter expert on her team. But she felt excited about the training project, so she volunteered. There were a few times while preparing with members of the more experienced training team when Shelia worried about what her peers may say about her. Maybe they would
laugh or not take her seriously as a trainer.
But Jen, the lead trainer, managed to calm her down, reminding her about her accomplishments so far, and that with a few more run-throughs, she’d be a pro.
Now, six weeks later it was show time, and her peers were filing into the conference room. All her doubts and insecurities started bubbling up, and she was sweating.
“Sheila, we’re ready, and we’re in this together.” Jen said. Jen, Sheila, and Gina joined hands like a football team getting ready to take the field and shouted “Go Team!”
The session was going smoothly, but Sheila’s nerves stared getting the better of her. She had her back to the audience for the chapter leading into the break.
At the break, outside in the hall Sheila started crying. “What’s wrong Sheila?” Jen asked.
“I can’t believe I had my back to the audience. How could I forget something so simple?”
“Sheila, you’re doing great. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Now you’ll be more aware of it during the second half. You can only get better.”
But Sheila was having a hard time convincing herself. “I just need to cool down. Then I’ll be okay.”
Back from the break Sheila was self-conscious and nervous, but her segments went off without a hitch.
At the end, the team felt great. They had worked hard, and it showed. Sheila learned that she could stand in front of her peers, and lead them in training. Because of this experience, Sheila will be on the training team again, and this time in front of the entire company.
Abby sat outside in her car for an hour before the meeting. She knew that it would take her at least this long for her to get the nerve up to go inside and join the group. She was having second thoughts. Maybe she shouldn’t have given herself so much extra time. Maybe coming late would have been better, or not at all. Now she sat here feeling sick to her stomach. Her nerves were fully taking over. She took a deep breath to try to calm herself and forced herself to get out of the car.
Putting one foot in front of the other, she had to will herself to take each step. At the front door of the building she stood for a moment with her hand on the door handle. Taking another deep breath, she assured herself that she wasn’t on a death walk, she was heading for what could potentially be her future in writing.
The other writers inside were once just like her, a novice, with just story ideas and a dream of being published. If anyone understood how she was feeling, they would. She pulled the door open and took a step inside, and told herself there no turning back now. She repeated her new mantra over and over again in her head, ‘You’ve got this!’
Her feet moving quicker, as she strode down the hallway towards the meeting room, her heart thumping as if she was running the 100 meter sprint. Was that a faint hint of excitement that she was feeling? It could be.
Finally, she reached the room and again she had her hand on the door handle. She gave herself one last boost. “You can do this. This is your future. Grab onto it.”
And so she did.
Nice tension at the start. I felt for Abby. I’ve been in similar situations and can relate, as I’m sure most of us can. Boosting yourself up with an energetic and positive statement is a great way to push past the nerves.
Thanks Wanda! It’s easy to write something similar that you feel yourself. I’m pretty terrified of sharing my writing, but I’m learning to get over my fear.
He was in his car going over notes he’d written for himself over the week. They wanted him to come in and show off some work he’d done based on their company. On top of that he’d have to answer their questions and prove he understood the company. This all sounded simple in his head but he knew well in advance that he’d have to come extra prepared. He was prone to being nervous, and it was only when he knew he did well above and beyond expectation levels could he be confident.
So he spent all of his freetime studying for this, when he wasn’t at The Burger Queens flipping patties over a hot grill and putting a zillionth batch of frozen fries in the the deep fryer with the occasional bits of hot oil popping on his arm, till they came out the warm golden color. He also had his college classes to think about. And he had taken on quite the load of classes this semester, so that his nerves had already been on edge. But he had been thinking for a while it was time to focus his life in the right direction, no matter how grueling it actually was on him, he’d push through it.
He threw a couple long fries in his mouth as he looked at the glowing blue clock on his dashboard. 5 minutes left till he’d walk in, their large overhead clock registering the perfect 15 minutes early. He’d go to sit to wait as if he had lot’s of time to spare. Effortless.
Actually his morning had turned out to be quite a mess, and nothing about it was easy. He had a test in the morning which he did not feel ready for. And he’d been nervous enough about that. He’d have to write a paper about something he knew nothing about in 30 minutes. Afterwards, he’d thought he did okay, but posibly foiled on the grammar somewhere because he was in too much of a rush.
But when the bell rang and his paper turned in, he sighed and relaxed for a minute knowing this issue was now off his shoulders. Now he’d go back to worrying about the interview. But as he was leaving class, he saw his bus driving by the bus stop at least 2 minutes early. He ran for it, but it was 2 blocks away before he got to the stop and still moving.
He started to jog down the block, towards home. He took the bus normally because parking was too much of a hassle at school and he didn’t want to pay for parking if he didn’t have to. While he did pay for the bus, it was 50 cents a day cheaper, so worth the extra problems, or so he had thought before he was jogging down the block.
He was tired and had stayed up too late. When the morning alarm rang for him, he didn’t want to get up. But he’d told himself he’d have time for a nap when he got back home. Unfortunately that idea now had gotten shot. Even with running, he’d lost too much time. He took his shower and put his notes together, he drank some cold left over coffee still in the pot to give him a hopefully descent second wave of energy but he wasn’t sure if it worked as he was starting to feel himself drag for the day. He stopped by his work at Burger Queens for his discount employee meal deal. And then went uptown for his interview. As he drove into the parking he’d drove around the block a couple times before figuring out which parking lot led to the skyscraper he was trying to get into.
Now he left the notes behind in the van, rolled up his sleeves three rolls, and brought a single poster board under his arm. He let the van door close. And walked in the building. He asked the woman at the desk which floor Mr. Magbink was in. “12th floor all the way down the hall and on the right,” she said.
“Thanks.” He took the elevator and found the room. He knocked and a woman, the secretary naturally answered. She told him to have a seat while she left to let his hopefully future boss know he was here. He looked up and smiled. The large clock ticked off, he was still 15 minutes early, he looked good, and he felt prepared. Effortless.
I sat outside of the office sitting on the hard plastic desk chair shifting from time to time to find comfortable position which turned out to be pointless.
I tapped my toes nervously waiting for her to call me in for my interview. I had practiced day and night for over a year to earn a spot on Ridlknis Music Academy in New York City. I was excited the night before and sure I would do fine but now sitting in the hallway outside with only the clock ticking slowly doubt began to set in and I worried over countless things.
A girl my age walked out in tears which did not help. My stomach was in knots and I tried to calm myself. I mean I had worked my fingers to the bone practicing.
I honestly thought about walking out and pretending this never happened. But my desire to attend was to string and so here I sat trying to calm down.
“Eliza Lestind.” She called out. I walked into the office with my head held high. I sat at the piano and it all came back to me. My fingers flew across the keys in a blur of black and white and the tinkling sound of the notes drifted out the door.
Success always follows the same principles: Work hard and have a good plan! You need the persistance to pull something through and the flexibility to adjust your plan when necessary. This is true for all jobs and for writing too.
What I can take from my job as DP/Camera Operator/Lighting Technician is the ability to focus on the moment and also the ability to merge creativity and “technical” knowledge into one seamless end product.
Focusing on the moment is very important on set, because any mistake could turn out to be very costly. Then in writing, focusing saves you much time and energy. Everybody who has ever had that experience of “having it pour all out in one single session” knows that.
Merging creativity with skills of the trade is an act of balance that you have to perform in cinematography as well as in writing: If you are too technical, it becomes flat and boring, albeit “correct”. If you are following your creativity too much and don’t regulate it in any way, it becomes chaotic and often not enticing enough, albeit very “creative”.
I’d look down at the ground, fresh smooth cement. This will be the place I go when I finish my project. I try to look in the glass door. But Light sheens off the window, blocking the view in. I tilt myself sideways and can see the soft edge of a leather chair. On the window, a white circle painted on it, and over it black letters in newspaper print in a no-nonsense fashion, and it seems to say, you will respect me.
When I have my manuscript I will open the door. For now I attempt to gauge what it will be like, by the feel of the air in front of it, because I am too nervous to go in. It is funny how the work I loved doing, and spent all the time on, how its fate will be decided on in this room or other rooms like it. Some other person will take it and measure it on their scales of good art and bad.
But at school the teacher liked it as long as I filled the page? And according to those people who believe in self esteem, if I feel it is good, then it is right? But as a stranger flips through pages with a cold eye, the crisp clap of pages, it becomes apparent that it isn’t enough. Being an artist today is about achieving perfection, or close to it. If after all your work, you can’t achieve that, then do something else. Leave this for the ‘artists’ out there who know what they are doing.
But I have found a way to get past the fog of anxieties. Forget about him, and his scales of justice, and piles of acceptances and his piles and piles of rejections. At least for a while. When I thought of him every sentence became questioned, would it stand, is it good? Is it good enough? And nothing got done, and God never created the Earth and the seas because he spent all day thinking about the publishers.
So now I just do. I let my creative instinct rise as it will. I can’t help but think about this beautiful building though, and the process people have gone through to get there. But I won’t be changing everything today, this minute. I will wait, let it simmer.