14

Everyone thinks that creating great art is easy, and it is, when you know how to do it. But what everyone leaves out is how do you get to the place where it becomes easy.

Writing, painting, music.

They all take time and discipline to develop the right brain patterns, so you can easily flow into creating something great. Without practicing for hours, drilling and drilling your chosen profession, then you will always fall short.

I heard a great saying the other day on a podcast, where the guy was a martial artist and he said to get better was like walking in a field of grass. To begin with the path that you choose is hard to follow, and difficult to cross, as the way is blocked by unruly grass. But after days and weeks and months of taking the same route, you have now formed a footpath, that is bare of all grass and roots, and is easy to follow to the destination that you what to get to.

And I believe that is true with anything you want to get good at, you need to create that path way through your brain till its beaten down and worn smooth by use.

What you don’t want to do, is take the path that everyone seems to take. You start out taking one route then, a few weeks later you switch to a different path, then a different path. Until the first one that you originally used, is now overgrown and hard to use.

Be consistent!

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.

Be deliberate, in everything that you do!

If you choose to write for an hour, then fucking write for a hour. Don’t sit at the computer, but spend twenty minutes writing and forty minutes fucking about on the net. The net is your biggest roadblock to success. It has taken me years to realise that, and if you are like me, I know what you will say to yourself.

I can stop surfing whenever I want to. But how wrong I, and you are.

Whenever I use to hear about people spending five hours a day watching TV. I would always think fucking losers. But man, if I didn’t spend more than that just watching youtube, reading blogs on writing, listening to podcast on writing, and just all around time wasting. Then I would chalk it up to more than five hours a day. Although I wasn’t wasting my time in front of the idiot box, I was still wasting my time in other ways.

And this brings me on to my second, piece of advice. To be good at anything you have to suck at it first. I remember my first piece of writing I did, and I uploaded it onto a writing forum a few years ago. It was filled of holes, spelling mistakes the whole shebang. I got pulled to pieces on there, if it was a real room and not just a chat room, I would have been laughed out of it. The words and comments won’t all that helpful, which is pretty surprising now, when I am in a number of writer forums and indies are anything but friendly. But I must have just stumbled on a negative bunch of writers, who knows. But anyway, I nearly left there feeling rejected, if it wasn’t for this one solid gold piece of advice.

It went something likes this.

Your writing is utter shit …. But it has promise, keep at it and maybe down the years you will fulfil your dream of becoming an author.

If it wasn’t for that woman’s one piece of advice I would have never continued on. I would have stopped at the first hurdle.

So to anyone reading this, I will simply say. Everything you write for the first year or two will be shit. Utter horse shit. But don’t despair, all the greats had to go through the same thing. If any say they didn’t, then they are simpy lying to you.

Remember.

To do anything well, you need to put in the time!

One way or the other.

Until next time dear reader

Love and Peace

P.S Buy my shitttt!!!!!