It can be a source of great inspiration. And it can be a source of great paralysis.

Knowing what to write about and how to do it.

On one hand, diving into the page without any plan whatsoever is a lot of fun. The possibilities are endless. You fly. You soar You reach the stars. Until you don’t. Until you stop because you’re not sure where you’re going. And then the paralysis sets in. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m not good enough to do this. I’m an impostor. Oh no! They’ll find out! What to do?” And you procrastinate, and procrastinate some more, and eventually get blocked and might even quit.

The opposite of this is planning ahead, and only when the plan is as solid as can be, starting to write. There is no soaring involved. At first. At first, there is only hard work. Structure, structure, structure. Yet when the hard work is done, writing it is incredibly easy. You know exactly where you’re going. You know you won’t fall because you’ve thought it all through. You get it done, and ship it, and start another project. And another. And another. People start calling you pro, and you realize, “Yep. I am.”

How to get from one place to another? By studying story structure.

It's easy to say and hard to do. I know, I know. I struggle with the same.  I'll have days when I want to kick up my head and holler at the sky my frustration. 

How much longer do I have to keep learning? How much longer until I have a breakthrough? A bestselling novel that I'll produce, that'll give me all the money I need to buy my own planet and to move there and to write there every day for as long as I want, without having to worry about bills, and food, and rent, and other annoying things like dishes and laundry??

Patience, my friend. It'll happen, if you only chip away at it every day.

They’re out there, as are the stories of how they got there.

When was the last time you looked whom you follow on your social media, and what it is you read every day? Who are the authors who write what you read? I don’t mean just books. I mean everything. News. Articles. Essays. Messages. Emails. And so on.

Write down a list of people who are your idols—people whom you want to follow and from whom you want to learn from—and dump everyone else. 

Kurt Vonnegut said, "Give your readers as much information as possible as soon as possible. To heck with suspense. Readers should have such complete understanding of what is going on, where and why, that they could finish the story themselves, should cockroaches eat the last few pages."

For the longest time I understood this quote wrong. I thought he meant to explain EVERYTHING and give it to the reader in such a way that they won’t have to think.

I was wrong.

What Vonnegut meant was make it crystal clear for them to understand your story, so they know whom to love and whom to hate.

I'll keep repeating this, both for your benefit and for my own.

I take it you have created your personal boundaries at this point. You did? Good. You didn't?? 

Drop everything and create them NOW. It's paramount to your health and to the health of your writing.