By Jessica Albon
Did you expect the New Year to roll in, bright and shiny and full of new inspiration and promise? Have you been meeting up instead with sluggishness and resistance?
Perhaps you’re finding yourself, as Alicia Paulson writes:
This time of year is like some kind of no-man’s-land. So strange. I think it happens every January, that feeling that you’re revving your engines, ready to go, and still — nope. Spinning wheels in mud, somehow.
For me, this happens most often when I’ve decided the way the writing will go. That it must go my way or no way. And so I am left spinning my wheels in mud.
There’s really only one way out of this predicament. And that’s to shut off the car engine, climb out of the car, and wait for the ground to dry. Sure, you could call a tow truck or wedge something beneath the …
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
I did something I’m still regretting, but fortunately it’ll be all over tomorrow: I signed up to take the GRE. What on earth was I thinking? It was a combination of a couple things–I didn’t take the SAT, and am curious about what that sort of test is like; and I’m starting to feel more interested in an item from my someday maybe list (“Get an MFA“)… So, on a whim, I signed up to take the test, paid my money, and promptly put off studying for the darn thing.
Until this weekend. So, here I’ve been, studying like a fiend, and very much needing a break from antonyms and math.
Interestingly enough, among the study breaks, I also managed to sketch out a flash …
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
Here we are, in the middle of winter in North Carolina, and the weather has been gloomy, gloomy, gloomy! Sure, there’s been some rain, but it’s mostly just been cold and cloudy. Every night, I check the weather forecast to see what to expect tomorrow, hoping it won’t be more of the same. Now something you only know about North Carolina if you’ve lived here for awhile is this: the weather is impossible to forecast here.
I’m a Santa Barbara, California girl. I’m used to the forecasters promising sunshine and temps in the 70s all week… And being right. But, even when I lived in Arizona, where the weather was a bit more adventurous, they were pretty accurate much of the time. Here in North Carolina, though, they …
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
Welcome back to the imperfect series on finding inspiration when you’re out of inspiration. Today’s tip is short and sweet: Let it be imperfect.
All too often, we get caught up in the refinement stage, in the making things right, fixing them, perfecting them. It’s easy to do–after all, we want to do our best work and we want things to be “just so” for other people. We want our readers to think well of us, but more than even that, we want to communicate clearly and not be misunderstood, we want our readers to have an easy time reading our articles, and we want our writing to make a mark on the world–all of which, we believe, only happens when we do “good work.”
Don’t confuse good …
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
Think your article topic is a challenge? Try promising people inspiration and see just how quickly the writer’s block sets in. And that brings us to our first two tips:
1) Get really, really honest. Have you noticed lately how much people are swinging between “Things are great!!” and “Times are hard.” Sure, “the test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function,” (F. Scott Fitzgerald) BUT when it comes to creating content and staying inspired, you’ll find integrity of thought goes a long way to ensuring output.
So, start by focusing in on the core of what you want to communicate, and let yourself be as vulnerable as …
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
If you’re in an inspiration drought, there’s one obvious way out: Make it rain. But how do you make it rain? Especially when you want not H2O to fall from the sky but big drifts of lovely, ready-to-go articles and content?
If all you need is a bundle of enjoyable exercises for getting creative in your writing, you’re not in a drought, and you’ll find these tips to be way too much work. Instead, get a copy of my tiny guide and ignore these tips. But if you’re in a full-on, desperate drought, you’re going to have to buckle down and sweat a little. The tips that follow won’t be easy, if you do them right, but they will bring the rain when applied repeatedly.…
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By Jessica Albon
This post is part of the Making it Rain Inspiration series. You can read all the posts if you’ve missed any.
You’re as tired as I am of all this talk about the economy and what it means to small businesses, no doubt. And I bet you’ve rolled your eyes at that 60% of Americans think a depression is likely statistic that’s been bandied about (and more or less made up/misquoted).
But that doesn’t change this fact: you might be mired in your own inspiration drought. I was. And many of my clients are. So, know that if you’ve been feeling a lack of inspiration and enthusiasm in your business, know you’re not alone.
The economy is hugely different today than it was in 1929. And these days, inspiration matters far more than it did back then. Face it, when people worked in factories, they didn’t exactly have to …
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