You are a tool.

(If you were born before the year 2000, that sounds like an insult, but I don't mean "you're an idiot." I mean, in the toolbox of life, we are all different tools. And you, dear writer, are a specific type of tool with a very particular set of skills.)

If you heard Liam Neeson's voice there, ten points.

But on a more serious note, most of us have had the experience of picking up a craft book, looking for the silver bullet, and walking away frustrated. We wonder why this famous writer's (or famous productivity guru's) advice doesn't work for us.

The reason is, they're a tool.

But not the same kind of tool as you.

"So the instruction manual for their tool type isn't going to work for your tool type. Yet somehow, we expect it will, and we operate in our writing world as though every single craft book is for us.

This is the reason, by the way, why a lot of us get stuck so regularly. We're using instruction manuals for someone else's tool. We're trying to use a screwdriver to hammer a nail. It's sort of working, but our handle keeps breaking because it wasn't made for this kind of brute force.

But we've been doing the "good student" thing and learning from everyone. The reason I do this work is because I started off as a fiction writer who had a very particular set of skills. I watched my friends struggle to find their process among an overabundance of information, workshops, books, advice, and conferences. Yet they still struggled.

The skills I'd been taught-by using the CliftonStrengths development program-made me instinctively reject advice that wasn't made for my type of tool. But my friends weren't able to as quickly say, "Not for me" when they would learn something.

I had friends who were natural discovery writers trying because they'd been told all writers needed a social platform.

It was painful to watch.

Not because of their struggle. Struggle can be really beneficial. But because they were trying to do something they were never going to succeed at, on the levels they needed to succeed at. Plus, they were ignoring assets they already had because they were told those assets were weaknesses.

So I started trying to help writers discover what type of tool they were, and because I'd already been doing it in other arenas for so long, it became second nature. And that work is what led me to this place.

In my career, individually coaching authors for success alignment, I've noticed that there are major patterns to how things happen in our author career. How our personality and/or environment and/or assets and/or systems can impact our success. My life's work has been to offer individual guidance. But when it comes to helping a broader base of authors, I realized something.

The patterns are often big-picture enough to be helpful to people, even outside the coaching setting. So this book is based on four major premises.

1. We're all very different. And those differences matter.

That means:

2. Not everyone gets stuck for the same reason. The cause ("why") is different for each writer (and sometimes, each situation).

That means:

3. We can't all get unstuck in the same way, but there are still patterns to how the majority of us get stuck if we can align ourselves to the why of the stuck.

Hence, this tool.

If we can figure out why you are getting stuck (especially the stuck-ness that happens consistently), we can more consistently get you unstuck. Not just theoretically, but actually.

We do find it helpful, in our coaching practice, to use the CliftonStrengths metric as a way of understanding how our brain functions, but any level of self-awareness should help this process.

Do you know whether or not you are externally motivated?

Do you know whether or not your brain needs thinking time in order to reach clarity?"

"Do you know whether or not your need for constant forward motion is a barrier to slow downs?

(Not everyone will resonate with all of these. Again. Different tools.)

But if you don't have any current level of self-awareness about your personality or how your brain functions, I'm going to recommend that you do some kind of reliable assessment to get a sense for where you fall on some of these continuums. It's not 100% necessary (I do think self-assessment can still be valuable even without tools), but when I talk about the need for thinking to clarity, or talk about the need to move at a faster pace, having some kind of metric can be helpful. There are several tools out there. If you don't like the Strengths, find one that works for you.

This process will go much easier if you have a level of self-awareness about what you need from the process of writing.

That being said, let's assume you have it so we can progress. Because I really want to get into the meat and potatoes of this book.

The Stuck List Tool Kit.