"Life is an open book intelligence test."
A. Huxley
WRAP
is a SAGEGOALS
service developed to help writers be able to deal with the unique
problems
which come with
the writing turf.
Writing is a
unique profession, and writers are a special breed of person. Working in
isolation,
often
spending long periods of time involved in creating a work with little or
no idea of how it
will
be received,
all
writers experience the bouts of self-doubt that inevitably crop up between the
flashes
of inspiration
and completion
of any creative project. That can
create a host of issues that need to be dealt with
and overcome, such as procrastination,
writer’s block, fear of failure,
dealing with success and adulation, the tension
created by the differences
between our
publicly perceived personae and our private realities of
bills to pay, children to raise, etc.,
to say
nothing of the temptation to use substances to
try to control
the roller coaster of emotional highs
and lows. It’s partly for those reasons that alcohol addiction
has historically been a frequent affliction
for writers.
Writing requires enormous amounts of self-discipline in order
to complete our tasks. And the requirements of that breed
equally strong counter-pressures within us that seek to fight and resist the
long-term restraints of disciplining ourselves.
As our resisting impulses increase, we begin to see signs and tip-offs that tell us
they need to be dealt with. We start
to
notice signs of them throwing veiled tantrums at any sign of being thwarted. Tip-offs of
a writers' resistance getting
out of whack are extreme mood swings, weariness, feeling overwhelmed or wishing
that people would just leave us alone,
and an increased tendency to have conflicts with
others. And increased desire for something that will predictable give us
a sense of retreat and relief from the internal pressures for perfection.
Identifying the tip-offs that accompany our self-defeating spirals helps us stay alert to
them in our lives and be able to catch
them at earlier, easier-to-control stages before
they gain momentum. As we recognize which tip-offs tell us that our resisting
parts are acting up, we also notice that some of them are subtler and show up
earlier. The SAGEGOALS daily discipline
harness
approach can help you get in control of those parts at their early stages.
Whether you are a
published novelist, a non-fiction, science or academic writer, a
freelance
magazine or news writer,
reporter, columnist, TV or film script writer, or just
an aspiring writer, WRAP offers you a free daily, ongoing, online
support structure and set of tools to help
you stick to your writing task in order to meet your deadlines, or self-set
completion goals. It also offers tool kits to overcome any problems that
hinder, obstruct or complicate your life and
make it difficult for you to write. To
use the free services of WRAP,
or the support services of SAGEGOALS, email
the counselor, Dr. Lee Wotherspoon at Leew@tiac.net
.