Numero Uno - You spend little or no time actually writing. Sure, you always think about writing and you always talk to other people about what you’re writing. But if you need less than two hands to count your weekly word count, you’re not a writer.

Number Two - You think being published equals success. Sure, that can be a goal. But I’m willing to bet some of the best, most interesting writing in the world is unpublished. Set goals for yourself, and stop counting on others to validate you.

Number Three - You always start talking about your writing by saying “This isn’t very good so…” This is my biggest pet peeve. I understand being nervous and struggling with criticism. But by saying your work isn’t good before anyone ever hears or reads it, what kind of expectations are you setting for yourself? Let them be their own judge and let the chips fall where they may.

Number Four - You copy other writers verbatim. There’s nothing wrong with trying to imitate somebody’s style. It’s actually a good idea until you’re confident in your own voice. Plus, you’ll never really imitate a Hemingway or a Faulkner, but what you come up with will sound different and be uniquely yours. But if you take actual sentences and just start stitching them together, you’re nothing more than a Frankenstein.

Number Five - You quit on your stories after one rejection. Show your writing to a hundred people, and you’ll get a hundred different opinions. One person isn’t going to make or break you. If you believe in something, show it to as many people as possible. Someone will like it. Some may love it.

If you write for yourself, your family or your friends, stop reading. You won’t ever need to get a thick skin to protect yourself from criticism. Everyone will gush over your work, they’ll read it cover to cover, and you’ll feel pretty good about yourself.

Once you open your work up to strangers, however, look out. And if you write for a business or a client, be prepared to be dragged across hot burning coals and have every single word you write be stomped into the dirt.

O.K., so it’s not that bad. But if you want to sell your writing or make your writing better, you have to learn how to deal with criticism.

Probably the most important and obvious tip I can give is to realize criticism is not about who you are as a person or your ability as a writer. It’s always about the writing, which is not you. If someone is coming down hard on you, ignore them. The kinds of comments that are directed at you personally aren’t constructive, and you probably shouldn’t get feedback from this person anyway, since it’s not helping you.

That’s a lot easier said than done. Here are some tips to help you get to that point where you realize it’s not personal.

• Get feedback from someone you know and whose opinion you trust. They’ll be the most likely to give you good feedback and make you feel good at the same time.
• Get feedback often. The more you expose yourself to criticism, the easier it is to take it. Once you get over that initial fear of showing someone your work, it’s semi-smooth sailing.
• Write with passion and from the heart. Revise and take other people’s notes with your head. The less you allow your personal feelings into the editorial process, the better.
• Realize it’s all about making you a better writer. If someone is picking apart everything in your latest story, remember that you can still learn something from it, regardless of whether or not you agree with it.
• Remember, you don’t have to take every piece of criticism. You can disagree with what someone says. Just make sure it’s because it’s the right thing to do, and not because your heart is telling you to not take criticism.

How have you dealt with criticism in the past?

Do you plot out your novels on notecards? I did too, until I stumbled across Google Notebook.

Some problems I ran into using paper notecards:

• Cards get scrambled out of order
• A pain to refer back to when I’m actually writing the book
• Don’t always have them on me in case inspiration strikes

So I decided to try out Google Notebook to plot out my current novel. It worked fantastically. Here are some tips and tricks you can use to not only plot out your own novel, but also to get the most out of Google Notebook.

Quickly Add Scenes

You can get the bare bones of your novel in place quickly by just clicking the blank space in your notebook. I rifled through all my ideas for scenes to get a rough idea for how the book would lay out.

Move Scenes Around

Once you get your first draft of an outline down, I always found it hard with notecards (and other electronic programs) to move scenes around without having to reread all the other scenes to make sure I knew where I was at.

With Google Notebook, you can drag and drop the individual notes you make. It ends up being very easy to scan your other scenes and play around with a different order.

Organize Your Chapters

You can add sections to your notebook and start grouping your scenes into chapters. The best part is you can still drag and drop individual scenes into whatever section you want.

Just click in the open space like you’re going to add a new note, then click “Add Section”. Drag any existing notes you want in there or start making new ones.

Use Google Notebook for Character Development Too

If you’re struggling to find a good way to keep all the notes on your characters in one place, Google Notebook has you covered there too. Just create a new notebook for all the different things you need to write a novel. Plot outline, character development, etc.

You can make each section a separate character. Now you can keep all your character notes and plot notes open while you’re writing your novel. Makes it pretty easy to keep track of everything if you can just tab back and forth through what you need.

Export an Outline to Google Docs

Once you have the outline done, it’s time to write the darn thing. Google Docs is a simple, web-based word processing tool that you can access from any computer with an internet connection.

Just click “Tools” in Google Notebook and you can export it to Google Docs. Then you’ve got everything laid out for you in a single sheet. You can use this as a guide as you write, or you can print it off as a handy outline to mark up.

Write or Get Critique From a Friend

Another great feature of Google Notebooks is that you can share your notebook as an editable document, or as a static HTML page.

So if you’ve got a writing partner and can’t sit together, you can collaborate online using the same notebook easily. You can even color code what you add so that you know who made what changes.

Or, you can send it to whoever you want as a HTML page and have them critique it for you.

Just click “Sharing Options” in the upper right corner.

Go to Google Notebook

How good are you trying to be?

Were you riding the bus one day, reading over the shoulder of a forty year-old woman entranced by her chick-lit novel when you said, “I can do better than that!”

Did you sit down at home, pop in the movie “Bats” and think “I should be a screenwriter?”

I’ve got news for you, if you shoot to be better than bad, you’re going to end up with nothing more than crap.

Watch your favorite movie. Re-read your favorite book. What is it about these pieces of work that you find so compelling. Right about now you should say to yourself, “I wish I could do something this good.”

Then go for it. If you use all the dredge and drivel out there as you’re measuring stick, your always going to fall short to solid, fantastic work.

Forget all the hacks and let them do their thing. You’ve got higher aspirations. The only thing you should learn from bad work is for a perfect example of what not to do.

Tons of aspiring creatives spend their lives sending out query letter after query letter, hoping against all hope that some unknown pair of eyeballs on the other side of the mailman is going to get their letter.

“Stop the presses!” he’ll yell. “We’ve got to find this person and make them famous!”

It doesn’t work that way. Surprised? Don’t be. The best way to get someone to look at your work is to have an “in.”

What’s an “in?” It’s a friend of a friend who works in the industry. A real person you can talk to that’ll give your work to the right person and vouch for you at the same time.

This person is out there, you just have to find them. And here’s the catch, they have to know that they can help you.

Here’s how you do it. Whenever you start a conversation, anywhere, and the other person asks how you’re doing, respond in this way.

“Busy. I’ve been working on (insert novel, screenplay, painting, etc. here).”

It’s that simple. If you can work this line in to every single one of your conversations, you WILL meet someone who knows someone. I have a friend who talks to everyone about his writing, and he’s got tons of “ins.

Some people are better social creatures than others, and that makes it all the more critical that the creatives with fewer opportunities for conversation maximize every one.

After that, it’s up to you and your work to shine.

If you’re just dipping into freelancing, or even if you’ve been at it for awhile, you could be grossly underpaid for what you do and not even know it.

So how do you know what you’re worth? You may think it’s not much, judging by the dearth of no-pay and low-paying jobs out there. But your creativity is extremely valuable. If everyone could do it, you would expect to receive commodity type rates for work.

But not everyone can do it, and you should be paid as such. Companies that employ creatives full-time understand this, and you should turn to them to figure out what you should charge.

If you need a guideline or a starting point for negotiations, this method is a good place to start. It’ll always be an inexact science based on the project, but this way you’ll be able to confidently ask for what you know you’re worth, which is half the battle.

Step 1 - Go to a free salary wizard like Monster’s. Are you a writer? Designer? Project manager? You’re trying to find a job description close to yours. Check the advertising category, they employ creatives.

Step 2 - Some salary calculators differ, but you should be able to enter your years of experience, education or location.

Step 3 - Find out how much someone doing what you do at a company makes. Pick the median number, or a little bit higher if you feel you’re stronger than the job description implies.

Step 4 - Add the costs of your healthcare, industry subscriptions and other business expenses. At a company, these are benefits. As a freelancer, you’re on the hook for all of it. The company you freelance for is saving money by not having to pay you full-time and cover your overhead, but you should still charge them for the time period you’ll be working on their project.

Step 5 - Divide the number you have by 52. This is what your weekly rate should be. Divide it by 40 and you’ll know what your hourly rate should be.

The numbers will probably vary by the market, so this number is one of many factors you should consider when pitching yourself. Ask what other freelancers you have a good relationship with charge. Get a good feel for the market you’re in, and you’ll have a more accurate idea.

Remember, a company is paying you for your time. You know how much your time is worth, and if a job is paying you 5 or 6 bucks an hour, you may as well go work at Starbucks instead.

The company you’re freelancing for wouldn’t pay their employees bottom dollar for the work they do, so why should they pay a freelancer a rate like that? Especially if you have experience no one in their company has.

Is writing no fun anymore?

Day in and day out you’re probably focused on turning out the best, most saleable writing possible. Your bread and butter ideas that pay the rent.

It’s like practicing free throws over and over again when what you really need to do is run back to half court and launch up a couple prayers just for the heck of it.

Most writers get stuck in creative ruts quite often. You work on the same type of thing repeatedly, and all of a sudden it all starts to run together like Jello on a hot summer day.

The cure? Spend ten minutes every day writing something you’re going to throw away. Pretend you don’t care about grammar, structure or any of the rules that have you chained to your routine right now.

Forget all the rules and just write what’s in your head. Write something fun for a change. If you laugh out loud and get that self-satisfied clever feeling, you’re doing well.

Once you’re done, throw away the paper or drag it to the recycle bin.

I’m a big advocate of carrying a notebook with you everywhere to jot down every single idea that pops into your head. Personally, I have 3 active at any one moment. One is always in my laptop bag, one is near my bed, and one is in the car. (It should go without saying that there is always a pen nearby too)

No matter how many notebooks you have, pretty soon they will start to fill up with gold nuggets just waiting to be mined. There will be plenty of turds in there that need to be flushed, too.

Every other week, I usually go back through what I’ve written in my notebooks. I often find myself expanding on ideas and writing more in there. If there’s something I want to explore, I add it to a “to-do” list. This is a very short list of ideas I actually think are worth exploring. Every day I set aside some time to do something on this list.

Sometimes, the idea gets killed after I explore it. The most important thing is to make yourself follow up on the ideas you write in your notebook. If you don’t periodically review it and bring the best things to the front of your mind, anything you write in a notebook is useless.

I’ve found making a short list that’s always changing is must easier to take action on because it doesn’t seem as intimidating as a huge notebook full of ideas that I have to surf through every time.

Every few months or so I’ll go through the whole thing just to see what is in there, but it’s usually the bi-weekly reviews of the newest material that adds the most to my to-do list.

The only person who will make sure you achieve the goals you set for yourself is you.

Scary thought eh? You are squarely responsible for getting things done.

It’s very easy to fall into the trap of setting goals for yourself and then not following through, thinking the work is done. “Heck, people always say half the battle is setting goals. The rest should take care of itself, right?”

If you’ve got this attitude, you’ve also probably got lots of goals, but no results to show for them.

And it’s good to have long-term goals that only get achieved after 1 year, 5 years or maybe even a lifetime. But within those large goals, there are tons and tons of “mini-goals” that you need to accomplish. These are the things you need to get done and out of your goal queue in order to achieve “the biggie.”
So how do you keep your self accountable AND keep your eye on the big prize?

Make your goal visual. Then put it somewhere you will always see it. This helps give your goal tangibility, a feeling that it can be real. It also constantly reminds you of what you want to achieve and (hopefully) inspires you to keep going.

My current project is to write a novel. So, I’ve got a picture of a bookshelf with authors who’s last name start with “P.” My last name starts with a “P.” My goal is to go into a bookstore and see my novel right in there with those authors.

Never stop.

Heard of the saying that success is 10% inspiration, 90% perspiration? That’s a little vague, so let’s take a look and see how that breaks down for idea generation.

There are five factors that go into becoming more adept at generating better ideas.

50% Hard work

There’s no way around it – to get one great idea you need to have ten bad ones. And if you get that ratio you’re lucky.

20% Organization

Being organized frees you from all the inefficiencies created by disorganization. The less time you have to focus on meaningless tasks, the more time you have to think.

20% Attitude

You must be in the right mindset to have and recognize an idea you can do something with. For instance, an idea doesn’t have to be great, just good and executable. Don’t throw away something just because it’s not the next iPhone or light bulb.

5% Luck

Sometimes coincidence and luck are your best friends. Learn to recognize a great idea that is born out of randomness.

5% Talent

A shred of talent is needed to get things from your brain to reality. I believe everyone has great ideas – creative people are the ones who have the knack and drive to get them from mind space into the world.