As a writer these days, everywhere you look it's all about 'brand' and 'publishing strategies'. It can be overwhelming, disheartening, and feel like it's all to complex to get your head around.
    If you ever get a chance, read The Art of War, by Sun Tzu. It's a book on ancient warfare strategies, but has been read and interpreted over and over by various other industries because a lot of the concepts cross over.
    Thinking strategically applies to any situation, and to any career. It just involves the ability to look ahead and play out the possibilities in your head. Then deciding on the path that will take you to the goal you want.
   In martial arts, you need to think ahead to avoid going places that will end up in unnecessary violence. (A lot of martial arts is about being strategic enough to NOT get into fights in the first place.) To think ahead when you enter a room or a situation. To assess the room, other people, look for exits, weapons, potential threats. To plan for how get out with the minimum of fuss. To protect yourself and others in the event you can't get out safely.   
    If you're in an altercation, you need to think quickly and strategically about how to use the space, deal with multiple attackers, avoid being trapped, use tools and obstacles to your advantage.
    Aikido advises you to keep moving, keep changing, keep adapting. Because if you stay still, you'll get overrun and clobbered.
    Writing is not dissimilar. Especially these days when things change so fast. While authors have always participated in building their own image and brand, today it's more vital than ever that they do it strategically. It's not enough to just send a manuscript in to an agent or publisher and let them deal with all the rest of the 'stuff'. Traditionally-published authors need to do a lot of their own marketing, manage their own branding, even sometimes run their own blog tours and pay for marketing.
    And don't even get me started on how much an indie author has to do.
   All of it with an eye toward what the market is looking for. Many authors start off in one genre, only to later find a niche in a different one entirely and have to rebrand themselves to suit. Indie authors have an advantage in that they can move fast, catch the latest trends and ride them, keep up with the latest software and platforms. Adapt quickly.
    An author needs to think ahead. Decide what they want their future to look like, then plan accordingly. Do you write to earn buckets of money and recognition? Then be prepared to be VERY strategic about branding, marketing, and multiple streams of income. 
    Are you just writing for the fun of it? Then you'll still need to master a few basic strategies to reach even a small audience of loyal readers. 
    Whatever you decide, prepare to change your strategy fairly soon. The readers, the platforms, the markets - they all move on and you need to move as well.

    I've been incredibly tired this week and when I'm tired, I'm far more likely to bull straight through a task without considering other ways of doing it. I just want things to work the first time without me having to think. Not great when you're a writer and your job is to be original and interesting.
    The martial art of Aikido has often been likened to water. Not only because the movements are fluid (which they are), but because water doesn't resist - it wraps around, turns aside, redirects. Adapts. Aikido is never about resisting, because that's about strength. And there's always someone stronger. It's about redirecting, adapting, enhancing. That's one of the things I love about the art. It's actually an advantage to be small, because the ONLY to make a technique work on someone bigger and stronger is to do it correctly. Force is useless.
    One of my senseis literally felt like a jellyfish when you grabbed his arm. The harder you grabbed, the harder you punched, the more relaxed he became. Then suddenly you'd be on your back seeing stars, with no idea how you got there, and wondering how soon it would be before you could breathe again.
    Because brute-forcing something is a fool's game. It always ends badly, for someone.
    Writing is also about being adaptable. There are pantsers and planners. Both (whether they admit it or not) have to be adaptable. (The planners have a harder time with this than the pantsers do.) Too often, people try to squeeze pantsers into a plan and force planners to be spontaneous.
​    The real key is to just relax. The more uptight you get, the worse your writing will be. The more you worry about whether you're doing it 'right' the more stilted your words will come out. Relax, adapt, experiment with a few different ways of doing things, change the plot or the character, or the setting, if you need to. Hell, change the whole world. You can do that, you know.
    Don't force a plot or character into a set mould just because that's the way you planned it. Allow things to change if they serve the story's interest best. And don't force yourself to plan a story if doing so kills the joy for you. But, if you're a planner to the core, don't sit there and try to force spontaneity. That's an oxymoron. 
    There is no 'right' way to write. All of these rules you've read are just guidelines to point you in the right direction - the end of your novel or story. But you can take your own path. Flow with your own creativity. Adapt to suit yourself and your readers. 
    The most important thing is: RELAX and stop trying to cram yourself into some mental image of the 'ideal' writer. 

This week in my writing I've been angsting...trying to understand how to write powerfully, so I can pull the reader along and make them feel what I want them to feel. It's not easy. (For me, anyway. I'm quite pragmatic.)
    In martial arts, when you first begin, your throws have no power and you're trying hard to copy exactly what your sensei does and how he/she does it. Quite frankly, you're crap and your partner is doing all the work. You're doing well to move your foot to the right place. It's physically impossible to master the subtleties because you haven't yet mastered the gross movements. Every movement is bigger than it needs to be. Every punch is obvious to your partner. You're just going through the motions, copying what the blackbelts do as best you can, not understanding how to move people.
    If someone attacked you a few weeks after your first martial arts lesson - or perhaps even a year after -  you'd probably revert to instinct and flail wildly at them. If you did manage a throw or a lock or a punch, it wouldn't be as strong and centred as someone who had been training for years. 
    That's what practice and learning is FOR. The more you learn, the more you practice, the more powerful and effortless your martial arts becomes. Your training partner how HAS to go with your throw, or risk a broken or dislocated arm. You will also adapt it to suit your own physical quirks and capabilities. Your art will become uniquely yours, in subtle ways.
    As a writer, most of us begin by writing derivatively. Rehashing things we loved as a reader. We'll often hit people over the head with preachy themes. Or have no theme at all, so the work seems flat and has no power to resonate. We write in cliches and overused tropes. We write obvious, predictable plotlines and shallow characters in obvious, predictable ways, not realising they've been done to death. We're just spilling words without understanding how we want to move the reader. Or how to write powerfully.
    Then you learn the things you didn't know about. Things like story structure - the shape of stories - and how to use that to build tension. Things like how to interweave theme and character arcs to help readers relate to characters. Or you start to understand tropes and how to subvert expectations in ways that both surprise and delight jaded readers. 
    Once you get your head around the large-scale movement and braided elements of a story - plot, character arc, theme - then you start to work on scene-level techniques. How to create tension within the scene, between characters, or with setting. How to set mood. How to make the reader want to keep reading past the end of the chapter. How to write in ways that resonate with the reader and immerse them into your make-believe world.
      How to write powerfully, in your own voice.
    But it's a work in progress. Forever, as far as I can tell. And it seems to follow the graphical representation of the rule of diminishing returns. It's a steep learning curve to start with, then it flattens out and you learn in tiny increments and feel like you're getting nowhere.
    It's only when you look back to the very beginning that you realise how far your writing has come. Or your martial arts.
    It's only when you re-read your early work that you cringe and realise how clumsy it was.
    But that's what learning is all about. No-one's perfect to begin with. But everyone can be powerful, if they are willing to learn, practice, and apply that knowledge.

This week I've been thinking about comfort zones. We all want to be in one. They're comfortable, by definition. But they're not where we learn new skills or where we do our best work. They're not where we find out who we really are.
​They are good places to recuperate after undergoing the stress of change, however, so don't chuck them out altogether.
     In martial arts, you most often find people wallowing in their comfort zone once they hit their first blackbelt. Whitebelts look at you with a bit of hero-worship. You often get asked to be uke (partner) for your sensei when he demonstrates (which is considered a mark of your ability as an uke). You are called on to help lower belts learn new techniques. It can be a heady time. So it's easy to feel like you've made it and you can cruise now.
Which, if your sensei is keeping an eye on you, is normally when he/she will step in and demonstrate something you don't understand. Or point out a flaw in a technique you thought you had down pat.
     At that point, it's up to you. Do you suck up your pride and hurl yourself out of your comfort zone again? Back into the world of uncertainty and frustration you spent so long pulling yourself out of? Or do you ignore the promptings and rest on the laurels already achieved; bask in the warm fuzzies that come from passing on knowledge to new students.
     Don't get me wrong. There's absolutely nothing wrong with passing on knowledge and enjoying helping others. You learn a lot from teaching people, as well. I quite enjoy it, myself.
But there's a danger in it, too. A danger of becoming too comfortable and too used to adulation. A danger of believing your own publicity, as they say.
    The same happens in the writing world. Writers who have a few acceptances under their belts, maybe a few awards, a few published books. They gather a group of acolytes and mentor them along the path. It feels good. Everyone likes to be listened to and respected.
     And you do, undoubtedly, learn from teaching and analysing other people's writing. 
     But there comes a time when you have to push yourself again. There are always new things to learn. Always new ideas, new techniques, new ways of seeing the world, the industry, how stories work. And these days the publishing industry changes so fast (as does reader taste) that you cannot afford to sit back and gloat over how great a writer you are. 
    There's always someone better. Never doubt that you can learn. Never arrogantly believe that you are the only one with good ideas and experience. 
     Find people you can learn from. Make yourself feel the discomfort of uncertainty again. 
It takes humbleness, determination, and a dollop of self-awareness to push through the boundary between the comfort zone and the discomfort zone. 
    But it's worth it for how much better you become, and how much larger your new comfort zone is when you master the new skills.
    The best blackbelts, and the best writers, are (I find, anyway) the ones who are most humble, least self-aggrandizing, and most open to learning from anyone.

 This week I've been suffering - as many of us do - with self-doubt. Is my writing good enough? Why isn't this easier? Maybe my stories aren't being 'seen' by enough people because my writing really is terrible. Our brains are horrible to us.
Many of us are afraid. Afraid to hurt other people. Afraid to try in case we fail. Afraid to throw ourselves into things in case it proves we'll just never be good enough.   It's especially obvious when you get women on the mat in the dojo. Painfully obvious just how socialised they are not to hurt people; not to be physically resilient; not to believe they are capable of mastering something as potentially lethal as a martial art. Women hit you, then apologise all the time. It takes ages to stop that habit.
    But, with time and training, both men and women will learn to overcome their fears in incremental steps, and will become capable martial artists. Often women are better than men because they can't use strength to make techniques work. They have to do it right or it just won't work.
   Mastering a martial art gives people just that little bit of extra self-belief that can be critical in times of stress and fear. In a true fight, self-doubt and fear will cause you to hesitate and you will lose the fight before you even start.
    In writing it's not always so clear when you're improving and succeeding. There are no coloured belts to achieve. It takes every writer time and practice to overcome their instinctive fear of not being good enough - of being judged unworthy. Even the best writers admit they, too, experience bouts of self-doubt.
    It's normal, but they don't let it cripple them or stop them writing. 
  We are a tribal animal. We rely on feedback to know our place in the tribe and to survive as a group. Self-doubt is hardwrired into our brains as part of our need to fit in and survive. Accept that you'll never completely overcome it. Understand why it's there. Let it go as a pointless waste of time. Every little new skill you learn IS improving your writing. If you're learning and thinking about what you want to get across to the reader, then your writing probably is improving, even if you can't see it and don't get a grading certificate.
    You'll never be perfect. Accept that.
​   Use the doubt to improve your skills, but don't let it stop you from writing.