Hello lovely students, and here’s the introduction to the final lesson in Write Yourself Calm, and it’s on story. Now if you’re a Complete Freelance Writing Course student, you’ll know we cover story there, and indeed, I’ve a course on storytelling in business. But in this lesson, we’re going to take a new angle.

The first story we’re going to look at is your autobiography as a writer. And I’m going to ask you to stretch your brain a little, in this exercise. I’d like you to imagine you working successfully as a writer in three years time. What will be the project (s) you’ve delivered? What will a typical working day be like for you? Who will you be hanging out with? When people describe the type of writer you are, what will they say? Please jot all this down.

And now, I’d like you to reengineer your progress back from here. So before you reached this ideal, what step lead up to it – what action and what decision? Then take another step back, and then another… in all I’d like you to take five or six steps back to where you are now.

Here’s what I mean:

6. Ideal: Crime trilogy published

5. Great publicity, readers found

4. Self publish successfully or good traditional publishing deal

3. Good covers, responses to beta readers, reader research

2.Good editing

1.Write books.

Do hope you find this the fascinating exericse that I do. It seems to free up patterns of thinking in the brain, and when you review from 1 – 6, you can test the logical progress of what you’ve planned. In the full lesson, we’ll do two further versions of this, using different contexts.

Next task here is to get this whole Write Yourself Calm course up on Udemy, and will keep you posted on this.

Meanwhile, here are a couple of interesting links that have come my way this week:

The Times featured this entrepreneurial writing site, this week https://storyterrace.com/en-GB/ It costs around £1500 to be matched with a writer, who’ll be suitable fit to write a client’s autobiography…

And if self-publishing attracts you, then this is a date for your diary: The Self Publishing Advice Conference, 17th October, with some top authors speaking https://selfpublishingadviceconference.com/ And, it’s that beautiful word, free!

Hope you are all fine, and getting stuck in – as we say in Wales – to interesting writing projects.