How to build a substantial body of work that allows you to fight imposter syndrome without burning out
Level up your writing career without burning out, destroying your life in the process, or having no life outside your work
This article is about building a substantial body of work without burning out. If you are a paid subscriber, I recommend reading about how to design a signature series, the secret to self-publishing success, and getting a book contract in the archives to dig deeper on this topic.
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There are three chasms you must cross in your career.
The first is the chasm of talent. When you begin, you will suck, and your goal is to create enough that you become good. The second is the chasm of popularity, where you attempt to build an audience of loyal fans who support and buy from you.
Eventually, if you work hard enough, you will become a good creator, and if you master marketing you will build an audience. Those first two chasms are infinitely surmountable.
The third is the chasm of self-doubt. I have never met a creator who does not wrestle with self-doubt even at the apex of their career.
As creators, we are birthing something from nothing, and in doing so, we are bringing something new into the world. It doesn't matter how often it happens, bringing something new to life is always fraught with fear.
Most people never learn to manage their self-doubt enough to bring anything into the world.
And I do mean manage, because you will never fully overcome it, and you will never fully defeat it. The best you can do is manage your self-doubt so that in moments where it presents itself you can continue on anyway.
While being a talented creator and gaining popularity are gorges like the Grand Canyon, self-doubt is more like an earthquake that cuts through the earth under you. It comes upon you suddenly, and rips the ground from you, sending you careening backward as it thunders and quakes around you. It is violent and painful.
It takes courage to stand in the face of such a force and continue forward anyway. This is not a test of willpower or strength. It is a test of courage. Do you have the courage to stand in the face of possible rejection and share your work anyway?
If you do, you will set yourself apart from most humans on this planet who can never get over that fear. If you can, then you might succeed, if you can traverse the other chasms as well.
The best way to deal with your self-doubt is by standing on a substantial body of work that gives you stability as the ground quakes under you. However, it’s very easy to destroy your life in pursuit of your dream. I gave up my life, my friendships, and just about everything in pursuit of being a successful writer.
I didn’t go to my best friend’s wedding because it conflicted with a show and our relationship has never been the same. I moved thousands of miles away from my family and only see them once a year. Then, even after all that, I burned out and haven’t been able to get back to the level I played at for a long time.
I’ve had an amazing career and I’m so thankful for it every day, but there are a lot of things I would go back and tell myself to get further quicker without giving up nearly everything in the process. I’m much better at this kind of stuff now.
This article is about how to be better than me, and will hopefully help you contextualize the whole of your life’s work without having it destroy your life in the process.
*** Please note that if you are reading this via email, Substack only sent out a partial version and the article will eventually stop without notice. If you want to read the whole 4,000-word article, then go to this website.***
2018 was a banner year in productivity and growth for me. I finished 15 books, my second most ever aside from 2021. On top of that, I also completed and launched three courses, which meant I completed 18 total projects in the year. I had never pushed myself harder than I did in 2018, and I was only able to do it because I set a big goal for myself at the beginning of the year and then worked to achieve it every day.
Before 2018, the most projects I had ever finished in a calendar year was four, when I wrote three books and finished a graphic novel in one year. In 2018, I increased my output by more than 400%, and in doing so I pushed myself further than I ever have in my life.
Since then, I’ve used the same strategies I implemented in 2018 to keep accomplishing big goals and building my body of work, pushing myself past my comfort zone every year in different ways.
Once you learn how to reach a big goal, it becomes easier to replicate it. So, I kept going, going, and going on a continuous search for more brass rings.
I found plenty, hoarding them like treasure..until last year something broke inside of me. I haven’t written a novel in over a year now, and I have absolutely no idea how to fix it.
I used to hear the voices of my character in my head desperate to get out, but they are now silent and have been since last June. It breaks my heart just to think about it.
So, this article is me screaming back to my past self, trying to tell him all the things I wish he knew about building a body of work and reaching a big goal in a healthier way than I ended up doing.
Fair warning, this advice is a bit like a nuclear weapon. You think you are developing these strategies to protect yourself, but once you harness this power, you become a steward of something that can destroy you just as easily as it can build you up.
The first thing you need to do when trying to achieve a big goal (and building a body of work is a huge goal) is to find the domino that needs to “fall” to pave the way for you to end the next level of your writing career. This will probably be writing more books, but it might be getting an agent, or landing a book contract at a top-five publisher, or launching a series into the top of the Amazon charts.
Gary Keller and Jay Papasan wrote an amazing book called The One Thing. In it, they talk about the benefits of finding the one, single thing which could change your life forever, The Big Domino, and putting an inordinate about of time and effort into tipping it over. In order for the domino to tip, there are all sorts of smaller dominos that need to fall, too, but all in service of toppling the big domino. If you need help visualizing what I mean, check out this video.
As you can see, knocking over the smaller dominos allows you to push over the bigger dominos with ease. The smallest domino could never knock over the biggest domino by itself, but it can push over a slightly bigger domino, which can push over a slightly bigger domino still, and so on down the line.
Most people do not line up their dominos in this fashion. Instead, they knock over small dominos with no rhyme or reason and with no purpose. Even if they can identify their big domino, they are not strategic about knocking it down.
Instead of lashing out randomly or trying to push over larger dominos that you don’t yet have enough strength to move alone, if you intentionally focus your attention on knocking over the correct smaller dominos first, and line them up in a manner that helps you topple the bigger ones, you’ll be more successful while better conserving your energy for the future.
The more intentional you are about knocking down your big domino, the more energy you will save in your own practice and the further you will get in your own career.
When you are doing something audacious and huge like building a substantial body of work, you are bound to fail and falter, even if it is only for a moment here and there. Maybe you didn't hit your word count for the day, or maybe you've fallen behind on your schedule. The worst thing you can do in those moments is beat yourself up. You're trying to do something incredible, and even if you fail, you'll fall higher than most people can ever dream.
If you waste your energy beating yourself up, then you have less in the tank to spend reaching your goal. On top of that, the more you let doubt creep into your mind, the more likely you are to fall even further behind. It quickly becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of depression that is nearly impossible to break.
I’ve suffered from Generalized Anxiety Disorder and severe depression for many years, and it’s so hard to stop a spiral. In my extensive experience, I’ve found that the best way to pull yourself out of a nosedive is to avoid getting into one in the first place.
If I can’t prevent a tailspin, then I allow myself to sulk for 24 hours when something bad happens. After that, I try to put it behind me and push forward. It’s not easy, but after years of work and getting on medication, it is possible for me now in a way it wasn’t before.
When you’re trying to build a body of work quickly, you will likely have to push yourself past the limits of your comfort zone at least once. In order to maintain your mental health in those moments, I recommend putting a timetable on any intense pushes.
I'm a firm believer that you can do anything for a short period of time, as long as you have an end goal in mind. Video game companies tend to work like this, engaging in crunch time around their releases. They are suboptimal, for sure, but the bigger problem in the industry came when companies tried to extend crunch time indefinitely.
Setting an end date can help push you along on the hardest days, but it can’t extend forever. When I wanted to give up, I told myself it was only for a few more months or books, and then I could take a break. This helped keep me going because I wasn't committing to my grueling schedule forever, just a finite amount of time.
You must uphold your deadline though, above all else. If you start lying to yourself, then it all falls apart.
When you push yourself past your theoretical limit, you risk the chance of burning out. As often as you can, allow yourself time to relax and recharge. Marathon runners don’t train every day, and neither should you.
I recommend scheduling breaks into your schedule and treating yourself every time you push over a small domino. There is an acai bowl place by my house that I kept in business for months while I was in the middle of a big push because I celebrated everything that got me closer to completing my body of work.
I know it is tempting to work harder, or longer, to finish a project, but the problem is that projects never really end, and you can’t stay in crunch mode every day for the rest of your life. When you push yourself once, it's easier to push even harder on the next project, and even harder on the next project still.
That kind of pace is unsustainable. So, you absolutely must set boundaries for yourself.
You will, hopefully, have a career that spans fifty years. You cannot possibly hope to maintain a breakneck pace for half a century.
You'll work yourself into an early grave. It’s better to develop good habits now, ones that you can maintain for the long haul, and which will allow you to enjoy your life.
That's why you're doing this after all, right? You want to have a life; a real, balanced life is not ruled by work even if it includes work that lights you up.
There will be times when you will have to grind it out and work extra hard, but that should be the exception, not the norm.
I wrote fifteen novels in 2018, which was breakneck for me. Between 2015 and 2018, I did over a hundred appearances.
Both of those things nearly killed me. However, at least they had an end date. I told myself I would write fifty novels in one year so I would never have to do it again.
I'm not so naive to think that you won't have to work hard sometimes. However, you are naive to think that it will not have an effect on your body in the future.
It's very easy for a breakneck pace to become the norm, and for us to settle into it, and then push ourselves ever harder with each passing year, but do you want to burn bright and flame out or still be here doing meaningful work half a century from now?
If you want to keep doing this work, there needs to be an endpoint to the madness. I have overclocked myself a lot in my life, and every time I did, I eventually burned out, sometimes ending up in the hospital.
Don’t be like me. You need to be intentional about this now. Don't wait. Figure out how to lead a balanced life and then work toward that as fervently as you work toward accomplishing your big goal. Don't put it off. Because when it's too late, then it's too late. Then, you'll have burnt out and it's even harder to recover when you don't have anything left.
As you reach for your big goal, make sure you aren't working in a bubble. You will need encouragement along the way, and you will need scolding along the way, too. Mostly, you will need accountability along the way, and you can't get it by relying solely on yourself. Find accountability partners that will help recharge your energy when it's depleted and keep you on track when you feel like throwing in the towel.
Sometimes, they will tell you that throwing in the towel might be a good idea. A couple of years ago I was looking to relaunch my podcast and messaged a friend about being a guest. I thought she would be excited, but instead, she just sighed and said (I'm paraphrasing here):
"I think this is a bad idea."
I was taken aback, so I asked why.
"You're doing too much," she replied. "Why don't you try to just be a writer for a while?"
It didn't make much sense then, and I disregarded it immediately. However, over the next year, her words kept nagging at me as I spent a lot of time doing things I didn't want to do just so I could make enough money to do the things I wanted to do, like writing.
I was doing dozens of podcasts a week, book marketing, killing myself to scrape by, and the whole time I wasn't writing anything.
I told my wife I had no time to write because I was trying to do everything, and she said. "It seems like you're just doing all this other stuff so you can funnel all your money into writing. What if you just didn't do that other stuff?"
She was right, too, as was my friend.
I stopped my podcast. I stopped driving traffic to my coaching and course business. I stopped doing editorial projects.
Whenever I see other people suffering the same burnout that I did, I think about what my friend and my wife told me. What if you just did the one thing you love, instead of the hundred other things you think you need to do in order to keep the thing you love going? What if you pared down to the essentials?
Would it allow you to put out more products and possibly, just maybe, cover the revenue lost by what you're giving up?
If you can't cut those things out completely, what if you cut out the low-margin activities in favor of high-margin ones? What if instead of doing something else and funneling that money into your passion, you just did your passion?
After I made that decision, I completed four major fantasy series. Now that it serves me, I’ve reincorporated non-fiction, courses, and book marketing back into my business, but with more intention than I ever had before.
We are taught that more is better, but that's not true. Growth for the sake of growth, without intentionality, is not better. Growth into something you don't want to be is not better. Busy for the sake of being busy isn't better.
The surest path to self-publishing success or get a book contract is to build up a signature series. After writing close to fifty books (all of which are quite good if I do say so) I’ve developed a system to get books done consistently.
Some of you are pantsers, so this won’t resonate with you, but the biggest gains in productivity I ever experienced came from developing better habits at the outline stage. Once I knew exactly what had to happen at each point in each book to keep it on track, it opened up my mind to work faster.
You would think that a system would constrain your mind too much and make things boring, but I found the constraint liberating. It meant I could do anything, as long as I hit certain beats at certain times in the book. It also allowed me to move on to the next book quickly because I didn't have to worry about the structure of the books, only their execution.
I used this post from Ghostwoods as a basis for my outlines, and then I tweaked it into a form that worked for me. I try to never build something from scratch if there is a perfectly good model to use as a starting point. Do not try to build something from scratch. Other people have walked your path before, and you need to learn from them and model their success.
The system I developed worked for me. It involved time blocking my days into green time when I was writing, yellow time when I was doing admin work, and red time when I wasn’t working at all, then finding a flow that allowed me to keep writing every day without getting exhausted. I ended up settling on 5,000 words a day, which allowed me to leave every writing day with something left in the tank and wake up every morning with the energy to keep going. When I tried to do more, I would suffer for 2-3 days afterward trying to regain my mojo.
By the middle of the year, I was sending books back to my editor the same day she was sending edits back to me, and we were running like greased lightning. I fell into a rhythm, and that rhythm kept me going on days when I just wanted to lay in bed because the tasks in front of me were so daunting.
I became a better writer by the end of the year than I was at the beginning of it, too. Writing so many books so close together allowed me to see the flaws in my work and improve quickly. In previous years, when I only wrote one book, it took me a long time to see my flaws. It was a lot easier to do when I was getting books back from my editor with the same notes every few weeks.
I did something similar at the very beginning of my career in 2006. Back then I wanted to be a screenwriter and was told that the first ten scripts that I wrote would be garbage.
It became my mission, then, to write 10 scripts as fast as humanly possible in order to get the garbage out of the way fast. Because of how fast I iterated on those scripts, I was able to grow as a screenwriter very quickly, learn structure, and become a good writer.
It was the fastest growth of my entire career because I went from horrible to good in a matter of months instead of years.
I was already a good writer before I started using an outline, but I still improved drastically by the end of that first year. It's the kind of growth you only get from deliberate, consistent practice. The change is hard to explain, but it's almost as if I can see a book before it's written in a way I just couldn't before, and preplan to avoid mistakes that would have tripped up my younger self.
If you want to break away from the pack of other writers quickly, you must do remarkable things.
Remarkable and amazing often get conflated as the same thing, but, while interconnected, they are not identical. A remarkable achievement is one that is worthy of remark. It is something that gets people talking and builds the lore around you as a creator. Companies spend millions of dollars on advertising in order to get people talking about their products, but you can accomplish much of the same by doing something remarkable, and then making sure other people hear about it.
In that way, a remarkable achievement often precedes you in conversation. Many times a month I have people connect with me because of a remarkable achievement I have accomplished that a friend or colleague mentioned to them.
A remarkable achievement is one that a person can easily tell somebody else that gets their ears to perk up. It is an anecdote that breaks through the clutter and makes you special. Yes, you might be an amazing author, but the world is full of amazing authors.
My career in large measure is built upon successfully attempting remarkable feats that built on each other over time. Many people make their living on the con circuit, but few have done 100 shows in three years, as I did between 2016-2018.
That is remarkable. That does not mean it is amazing. It only means that it is worthy of remark. It is also something any person can do. It simply means spending every weekend at a show for three years.
Many people write novels, but few have written 15 books in one year, as I have done twice now. Again, another remarkable feat. When I tell people that, their ears immediately perk up. Even if I were not a USA Today best-selling author, telling people I wrote 15 novels in one calendar year makes people stand up and take note.
The more stories you can craft about yourself, the more people will talk about you with their peers, and thus, more people will know your name.
However, remarkable things don't generally just happen. They take lots of planning and forethought. As you go about planning for the next twelve months, you should think about what you can do that is remarkable. It might be doing 10 years of work in a single year's time. It might be hitting a bestseller list. It might be working down your debt to zero.
Whatever it is, what can you do that is remarkable in the next 12 months?
One of the most powerful shifts you can make in your business is to stop thinking from the perspective of how you feel and start thinking about how everything you do should be received by other people.
How will this make somebody else feel?
How will this project affect other people?
What is this meant to evoke is another person?
Why is this project important to others?
If you look at every meme that goes viral, it is always about how people can see themselves in it, or how they can see somebody they love in it.
Those things that really connect are all about how the thing we made filled in a little part that was missing in a person's soul, made them feel whole for even a second and made them feel like they were slightly less alone in the world.
This is the true key to reaching a big goal and building a body of work. It’s a lot easier to push over dominos if you are trying to do something remarkable. It’s much easier to reach a goal if people are talking about you and your work. It’s much easier to level up if other people feel like your success helps them feel seen, too.
Success is little more than many, many people believing strongly that you connect with a small piece of their soul that is desperate to be seen.
When they share something, they are saying "LOOK AT ME! This matters to me, and if it matters to you, then we are part of the same tribe. If we can both enjoy this, maybe neither of us have to travel through the world alone."
For instance, almost all creators can describe what their project is on a basic level. Few can explain why it's important to them. A couple can discuss why they are uniquely qualified to make it.
Almost nobody can describe the feeling they are trying to evoke in their reader, and why their work will make them feel a little less alone in the world. More and more things are made every single day, and soon AI will make even more than we could ever make on our own.
The only thing we're going to have, in the end, is how our work makes others feel, how they look at what you do as a reflection of them, and how they feel less alone in the world when they think of the thing they made.
Even though every post I make is about something I struggle with, or have struggled with, they are never about me, they are about making what I wrote applicable to the reader, so they resonate with you, and burrow deep down into your soul.
Sometimes, I am more effective than others, but always that is my goal, with every project, with every post, with every tweet, and with every move I make in the world.
If you resonate with what I do, it's because I've infused myself deep down into the core of every word I speak, but then my ego gets out of the way, and it becomes about how it can resonate with you.
So, do I think you should try to reach a big and audacious goal by building a substantial body of work? Absolutely, I do.
It will allow you to grow in ways you can only imagine right now, and in ways that I was only able to scratch the surface of in this article. If nothing else, it makes you imagine a world where your life is different. The more you live in that world, the more real it becomes, until you grow into the person who could live in that world with ease and grace.
Just make sure to manage your expectations and give yourself a lot of grace, because reaching a big goal like building a body of work is hard, and doing hard things is very hard.
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I want to be Russell Nohelty when I growup.
What a remarkable post!