Make Your Writing Goals to Stick ft. Erin Marcus (Classic Replay EP#569)

Be in charge, take action, get results. 🎯 Most of us stay stuck because we’ve never actually decided what we want. Business coach Erin Marcus on working out the outcome, reverse engineering the steps, and putting a date on it. 📅 A classic replay, and all of it still applies. ✨

Her starting point is that most people don’t get what they want because they’ve never decided what it is. Others know, but don’t believe they’re allowed to have it. Either way there’s nothing to reverse engineer from, so the work becomes what Erin calls random acts of marketing.

The fix is a process: Decide. Take action. Look at what came back. Decide again. Erin writes out what she wants every morning because it makes the rest of the day’s decisions easier. She works in specific outcomes rather than feelings, because feelings are vague enough to let you off the hook. Then she asks the question that stops most people: when is it happening? Put it on the calendar, then live by the calendar.

There’s a long stretch for writers in the middle. Trudi once spent an hour with Erin trying to decide whether she wrote urban fantasy or paranormal romance. Erin’s read was that the decision was giving her a reason not to start. Start the book — the genre settles once the book exists. Pick a niche for now rather than forever. And a lot of the subgenre agonising exists because Amazon needs a category to sell ads against, not because readers need one.

In this episode:

Why most people are stuck: they haven’t decided what they want, or don’t believe they can have it

Reverse engineering the steps from the outcome

“Random acts of marketing” and where they come from

Wanting the impossible: if the outcome depends on other people behaving, it isn’t yours to have

Erin’s daily written practice, and why she does it before anything else

Start with what you don’t want, if that’s easier

Specific outcomes beat feelings, because vague language is where we let ourselves off the hook