Episode Script:

If you are like me, you probably listen to a number of podcasts about indie publishing. There are a ton of them. Dozens of them are great. Some of them are considered absolutely essential listening for all indie authors.

But, the podcast-o-sphere, like the blog-o-sphere and the 24-hour-cable-news-…o-sphere… are echo chambers.

“The Audience” is a vague, amorphous entity and it hungers for content. It needs its regular feedings or it will turn and feed on the only thing it can find. Your soul.

So, we give it content…

That isn’t inherently bad, in-and-of-itself. The danger comes when we, as “the audience” forget to analyze everything we hear. We forget to use our own minds to determine if something is worth accepting into ourselves or not.

Letting something become part of you without making a conscious decision to absorb it is the single most dangerous and destructive habit humans have as a species.

We all do it. We can’t help it. It’s human nature.

Fortunately, I think writing is probably the best way to gain insight into yourself.

“Writer, know thyself.”

You can’t do this for long without starting to be able to recognize patterns in your behavior. You gain a certain kind of clarity. Almost like stepping outside of yourself and seeing your traits as you would one of your characters.

And, if you have the will and the strength, you can start to make positive changes through conscious decisions.

Or, you can be like me, and just feel smug about your self-awareness while you go back to being a despicable example of what appears to be an almost functional human being.

Either way, the experience teaches to recognize the things our fellow authors, and especially our fellow indie authors, tell each other for what they are. Dangerous, toxic axioms passed down through the centuries.

Recently, I’ve caught myself dwelling on one of the all time biggest and one of the current hot trends.

If I’m going to survive them, I’m going to have to steal their power. Like any good nerd, I only know one way to do that:

Debunk the crap out of them and make the jocks feel bad enough they forget to dunk my head in the toilet.

Sure, it’s a defense mechanism, but I need it in my life right now.

So, that’s what I’m going to do.

Dangerous Soundbyte Number 1: Writer’s Block Doesn’t Exist

“Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block.”

I hear this all the time. Usually from well-established authors with enough published work under their belt to qualify them for the incredibly fluid and elusive title of “prolific.”

But, here’s a little secret: If writer’s block is defined as “not knowing what to write” it definitely exists and under a similar definition of “not knowing what to do” plumber’s block exists, too.

I think both are a matter of experience and skill.

There is a reason the master’s of the craft don’t believe in it anymore. They have gained the abilities needed to overcome it through hard work and training. They’ve learned how to solve all of the problems. They’ve got all of the tools they need. That’s why they are masters.

But, like all humans, their minds favor remembering the positive things and banishing the bad. It’s one of those tasty neurological survival things. We forget when things suck and it causes us to live in a revised personal history.

Most of us, myself included, are apprentices in this craft. We’ve learned some of the skills we need, but we just haven’t ever encountered something a master finds old hat.

We’ve never seen a metaphorical clog caused by He-Man underoos being flushed down the drain.

So we don’t know what to do. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We get stuck. We get discouraged. We give up.

And that, my friends, is writer’s block.

There is hope, though. We can do like the apprentice plumber does. We can get help from an old pro.