Creating the End of Your Writing Project
Have you ever “visited” the spot on the shelf in a major bookstore or library where your book will one day live?
If you’ve ever created a Vision Board as an exercise in Manifestation | Attraction, then you may appreciate the technique of creating visual mock ups of completed projects — even before you start them. Creation and Manifestation are about channeling abstract thoughts and ideas into something “real” — giving form to the formless. Inspiration — the Really Big Cool Idea — is the beginning, the middle, and the end of a creative journey.
I generally advise against what I call “Time-traveling” — spending too much mental time in the abstract past or future without being present or taking action in the present — because more often than not this contributes to anxiety.
But for long-format projects — such as writing books — the emotion and the tactile sensation of the future completion can be a motivation/visualization tool.
Up until recently, this has been a somewhat embarrassingly private activity that I thought might sound a little “silly,” but then last week I heard Dr. Wayne Dyer say that he does the same thing when working on a book — creating mock ups of the books he’s about to write or currently working on.
At an Angel Therapy® Practitioners gathering, Doreen Virtue told us that when she was trying to get a book deal, years before we all had access to digital desktop publishing software, she cut the logos of the major publishing houses she was targeting off paperbacks she found in thrift stores and garage sales and pasted them all over her house — as a manifesting technique.
Mock-Up Book Covers and Dust-jackets
Create cover art for a “completed book” — before you write it.
I do my own graphic design and illustration work because I enjoy it as a creative outlet in and of itself — and as a one-man self-publishing operation it’s also a cost-effective business necessity. I also employ this as a brain-storming, channeling, manifesting, and creative visualization exercise.
I have a shelf in my library dedicated to my own writing projects — many of which I haven’t even finished yet. I literally create dust jackets with my own titles, artwork, and my name on the spine and wrap them around whatever hard-covers they will fit.
I’ve even gone so far as to use print-on-demand publishing services like Lulu.com to upload, print, and purchase very realistic perfect-bound paperbacks that look and feel as close to the “real” thing as possible. Yes, they are blank inside! I then use them as project notebooks or glorified rough draft sketchbooks to record and capture the material as I’m working on the project.
Most of my “virtual” ebooks, products, courses, tutorials — the ones I only sell in digital format to the public — still exist for me in highly-limited edition print volumes. These are very helpful during the editing process and when I want to reference a specific page or passage without scrolling through a long PDF.
The idea here is to feel the sensation of the completed, physical book, to “trick” or program my mind to work with the emotional energy of the end result. I can feel what it’s like to hold that finished product and use that as a beacon to guide me toward a finish-line.
Have you ever “visited” the spot on the shelf in a major bookstore or library where your book will one day live? About ten years ago, I was working in a metaphysical bookstore. Before the store opened, I brought in some of my mock-ups, placed them in the sections where they would be shelved, and took polaroids of them. I blush to tell you this — at the time, I was very furtive about the whole activity. If anyone had “caught” me, I would have felt exposed as some kind of desperate wannabe.
Back then, I thought Shift Your Spirits was going to be a book — I never dreamed that it would end up being a web site. The final format was not at all what I originally intended — it actually became something quite “bigger” than a book — it manifested many years later as an entire business.
The “cover imagery” is very different from that original mock-up — I also had very different tastes in typography back in the day. But I can’t help but remember the image in my mind of that spine on that shelf with the title and my name.
CD Covers and Jewelboxes
Create cover art and insert booklets with liner notes for audio products — before you write and record them.
Again, even though I may sell lectures and guided meditations as mp3 digital downloads — the overhead and distribution makes a lot more sense for these projects — I still create mock-ups of physical CDs. Most of these CDs live in the armrest CD holder in my car. Some of them are actual burned copies of existing audio products I’ve created — but in nearly all cases I created the artwork before the project was even started.
Word processor templates
I was told by an editor several years ago in a writing/editing/publishing course to format the document in your word processing software to match the font, size, and spacing of a printed book, so that as you are working on drafts — especially when you are reading/editing the printed manuscript — it literally looks as much like the “real deal” as possible.
Internet Marketing
You’re probably well-aware that for years internet marketing gurus have advised writing your sales page before you write the product, and in some cases, even pre-sale a course before you’ve created it. I have certainly done both — there’s nothing like a sales page to outline what you want to provide and absolutely nothing like a pre-booked teleseminar filled with paying clients who are going to show up at a certain date and time to motivate you to prepare the lecture and exercises.
Web Design Mock ups
Most web site and blog theme designers are certainly familiar with creating layered, Photoshop composites and wire frames as a way of planning and organizing the layout of future content. I have dummy sites and test blogs and PSD’s all over the place — for every potential iteration of every site I’ve ever designed. For every site or blog that you actually know me for, there are ten or twenty that are totally underwraps or may never even see the light of day…
I discover thousands of words — picture first.
Slade Roberson is an intuitive counselor, ATP®, professional blogger, and the author of Shift Your Spirits, Automatic Intuitive Response, and the PageCoach Problogging Tutorial Series. Slade on Blogging shares behind-the-screens internet marketing, self-publishing, and blogging strategies with other personal development writers, coaches, and healing arts practitioners.
Comments
3 Responses to “Creating the End of Your Writing Project”
Leave a Reply
-
Affiliates
-
Search
Being in the technical writing profession, and harboring the dream of one day publishing my own book, I must say I loved this article. I think I may even pass it on to the writer who work for me.
We are celebrating the possibility that is contained within us by creating a Mock Up before the product. Then our imagination can latch on to the beauty that will come and make it a reality.
Love the concept and I’m going to use it right now. Thanks!
Slade, How crazy. You read my mind. I have absolutely went to the R section of the library and said to myself” That’s where my book would be, when I finish it?”
And I still think your website can be produced into a book form too… Why not?