Great leaders read great literature

Are you a writer who has always wanted to write, and in fact, did have luck in writing courses in high school or college, but you haven't written in years?

Does your passion to write and inability to do so cause you more than a little despair? Does your inability to just do it make you deeply upset with yourself?

I think the biggest block to writing is the enormity of it. In our minds, we see a 300-page book with our names on it. How huge is such a prospect! How scary! We think: where do I begin? How long will it take? Do I have years of my life to devote to this?

Can you waste the years you have left NOT devoting yourself to something your soul wants to do?

So, you're staring at a blank page; actually the blank page is in your mind, you haven't even gotten the courage to open Microsoft Word on your computer and really stare at a blank page, because that would be an admission of how stuck you really are.

Where to begin? Anything you focus on will grow. Period. So, focus in any way you can on writing. Read good books. If you're a business executive, don't just read business books. Read good literature; good literature can make you a good leader. The New York Times ran a great article on this last year: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21libraries.html

Get a book on writing, even one on writing fiction can help, and sometimes I think can be more inspirational than books on how to write for business. This isn't just about putting technical information on the page; it's about inspiring others with your message. Some good how-to-write fiction books are: Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

You must begin somewhere. That somewhere can be as simple as reading good literature. http://www.theliteraryexecutive.com/

Don't Think. Act.

How many times have you wanted to sit down and write the book you've always wanted to write, but instead you simply thought about it for days, hours, even years. How long have you been waiting for inspiration? As a novelist and former journalist, I know better than some, less than most, that the inspiration comes in the doing. So, I want to finish editing the climax of my novel Earth, and I can't because I tell myself I don't know how.

Well, of course I don't know how if I just sit and think about it. That's just not the way writing of any kind works. If you do the actual process of writing, you will be inspired. If you sit and think about it you will be frustrated. It's just that simple.

So, I take out the chapter, the climax on Earth, and I just start. Sentence one. Page one. What could make this sentence better? Sentence two? Paragraph one? And slowly I start to build steam and all these huge epiphanies are propelling me through the story on wings of fire. I'm soaring! I'm dreaming I'm flying over Earth the novel, over the chicken coop, the fenced off yard for the baby cows, over the house, the family working the land, and further, I'm flying across the ocean to a place where the ancestors of that family lived and I'm seeing them, and I'm witnessing the climax from a much higher and greater perspective.

And it was all because I just opened the document on my laptop and looked at it. How many hours did I sit around waiting? Days? Months? How many? Too too many.

My policy now: don't think. Act. From action comes inspiration. Only then do the muses show up, line up to propel you on your way...

The same can be said for any kind of book, from memoir to a self help business book on leadership. Inspiration comes in the doing, not in the pondering! www.theliteraryexecutive.com