Are you a Frustrated Writer?

Interruptions, writer’s block, dead-end ideas, low (or nonexistent) sales, bad reviews, lousy vendor customer service, keyword boxes, watching others skyrocket to success while you’re stuck in the mud, the list is endless. You’ve spent hours of your life pouring your heart on the page only to find that no one seems to care. Roadblock after roadblock, failure after failure leads to the Frustrated Writer.

You’re not alone. I think you’ll find that 99% of those compelled to put a story on the page end up frustrated and disillusioned at least some of the time, if not most of the time. Maybe you’ve come close to giving up on your dream. Perhaps you already have. As you scroll through page after page of competition before finding your lowly book on Amazon’s gargantuan listing (with a handful of mediocre reviews), you begin to realize how competitive the market is for a product that seems to be losing favor with an increasingly critical audience.

It’s easy to lose hope. You would have to be some sort of superhero to stay positive and push forward all the time. That’s why you need to stack the odds in your favor as best you can. Sure there is marketing, promotion, cover design, algorithm hacks, keyword research, paying for reviews, etc. But ultimately it comes down to writing the best book you can with a compelling and active story, with a good pace, strong characterization, and a vivid world. And, most importantly, it requires staying on task and getting the words on the page!

I can’t stress enough the importance of form and structure for a writer. Sure, a few authors out there can freestyle three best sellers a year, but not many. Even some of these greats are guilty of a rambling book from time to time. Our minds are chaotic places, and sometimes the ideas come out faster than you can adequately articulate. It’s hard sometimes to say no to these pesky thoughts, and they sneak into the prose. They may seem like gems, but they’re garnets and fool’s gold at best. Most of the time, these sparklies start to lose their luster as you stack them on end. Before you know it, you have a hot mess of flowery grandiosity on the page that will frustrate the story-hungry reader.

I am guilty of this folly too. Although I’ve written millions of words, published two books, am currently writing two more, and have countless others in the drawer, I still have a lot to learn. The time and effort it takes to complete a novel slows down the mastery of the craft considerably. It usually takes a library of work before a fantastic story falls from the crucible. There’s a common notion that it takes 10,000 hours to master a skill. Some say this is an arbitrary number, and maybe it is, but it still instills the idea that it takes a lot of time to become good at something. It equates to realistically a decade devoted to a single mastery goal before you indeed master it. Have I become a master? Certainly not, but I’ve been writing long enough to have gotten much of the fluff out, leaving (mostly) the story. But this took longer than it should have, and let me tell you why.

Over the years, I’ve come to value structure and form. I’ve used many different methods, but most of the time, it has been a stack of notebooks brimming with random notes. I’m sure I am not alone here. Yes, it helped to have a place to get these thoughts down, but it was also tedious going through all that chicken-scratch to find what I needed. A couple of months ago, I found myself searching for an idea I had for a character in my recent work. It came out of the ether at the most inopportune time (as it so often does), and I scribbled it down in my notebook. But when I needed it, I couldn’t find it for the life of me and ultimately gave up and moved on. At this moment, I realized I wanted something more. I looked online for the solution to my problem and was surprised it wasn’t there. Sure, there are many helpful writing tools out there, but they were scattered and often provided too much form. I want to be organized and to the point, but I still want to be creative.

Thus, I gave birth to the Frustrated Writer. What’s that you say? Well, for one, it’s a collection of writing tools that I hope will help authors craft their next great work. It started as a selfish endeavor, to get the type of form I desired physically produced cheaply. But soon, I realized that others could benefit. You may be saying at this point, “You wrote all that just for a plug of your product?” But if you’ve dealt with Amazon KDP and see the price of these tools, you’ll realize that I am not making a lot of profit. After printing costs and Amazon’s cut, I make about $1 a book. I don’t need this money, but it does offer some validation to the idea, and I hope that what profit I do make can go back into the Frustrated Writer‘s cultivation. If successful, my goal is to create a community of support for Indie Writers to help ease their Frustration, or at the very least, provide a place for venting so they can continue moving forward and keep the art alive.

So what does the series include? First, Plot Summary Sheets with a helpful diagram to map out your story ideas. Everything starts with an idea, but sometimes we get 50 pages in and find out that there isn’t enough substance to keep it going. Sometimes, we may get lost on our journey- building and growing, but never reaching the climax and resolution. Other times, we think of one idea while working on another. This form will help flesh it all out, organize, and give you a map to success.

Next, your work needs strong characters. The Character Profile Organizer asks a series of detailed questions to flesh out a complete and vivid person. Will all of it make it to the novel? Probably not, but it will help you create depth. You could spend considerable time and effort pouring out the details for a character and still have people say they are shallow. That’s because, often, the depth comes from what you allude to and don’t put on the page.

Thirdly, we have the Chapter Summary Organizer. Again, this adds some form to your story. Sometimes you can’t write in order, or you have an idea and not the substance, but you still want to move forward. This organizer is a helpful place to organize all the bits.

Next, the World Building Planner is just that, a place to formulate a vivid, complex, and deep world to host your characters and their story. Is the world the most important part? No. Do some spend too much time on the world and not enough on the story? Yes. But sometimes, the world is what gives a tale magic and again, the depth of this world often comes down to what is alluded to and not what actually makes it to the page.

Then, there is the Writing Log. Nothing is more important than getting words on the page. Some of them may end up in the wastebasket, but you have to be consistent in your writing, set goals, and reach your word counts. It is too easy to distract yourself from writing. Before you know it, you’ve wasted an entire year. The writing log will help.

Lastly, there is a plain old notebook for all the things that don’t fit nicely in the above forms. Yes, there are plenty of notepads, journals, and diaries out there, but this one blends nicely with the series for those that like some consistency.

So, if you’re a Frustrated Writer and want a little structure to capture your best work, check out the series and see if the tools are right for you! And if you are looking for more, I have plenty of ideas yet to come, so check back soon! As always, suggestions and feedback are welcomed and can be put below or on my feedback form.

Cheers!