Acknowledging progress

Celebrating six months of our book 'Written' being published - with a favour to ask.

We had a nice surprise in our inbox yesterday when we opened an email from Will, a writer who’d just read our book Written. The subject of the email was simply ‘thank you’ and this is what he wrote:

Morning,

I’ve just finished your book and wanted to drop you a quick email to say thank you. 

I’ve written 8000 words in the past 13 days on a project that had up ‘till then sat in my Google docs folder in a state of neglect. 

I just needed to share that with someone, and as you’re the one’s responsible thought it should be you.

I have and will continue to recommend your book to anyone that will listen.

Thanks, Will

We often tell writers they should acknowledge their progress. Any writing journey (indeed, every journey in life) will have ups and downs but sometimes, it’s all too human to focus on all the things we haven’t done while brushing all the things we’ve have achieved under the rug¹. We thought it was time to follow our own advice.

So, six months on from publishing our book Written: How to Keep Writing and Build a Habit that Lasts, I hope you’ll allow us a brief moment to pause regular service and acknowledge our own progress.

‘Life’ happens

Written took us ten years to research, three years to write and is the result of working with hundreds and hundreds of writers over the years. We re-wrote it 11 times, with the help of feedback from several editors and dozens of beta readers, all of whom we thank in the acknowledgements.

Writing it wasn’t easy. It caused much bickering and moments of desperation and despair. We recall in the conclusion to the book how the process of writing it often felt like we were trying to assemble a broken engine with all its parts strewn around us on the floor. To stretch this analogy perhaps further than it should go, we would now add: without a manual or any knowledge of how the parts work and what bit should go where.

As we wrote it, ‘life’ certainly happened. Sadly, Bec’s dad died, we had business challenges, financial hardships, illness, and to cap it all off, our house nearly burned down as a huge fire engulfed a neighbouring mill. Oh, and there was that global pandemic too. We are, quite literally, lucky to be alive.

This is not to say we coped with any of this any better than anyone else and we’re certainly not holding ourselves up as paragons of resilience - the last few years have been truly shitty. But looking back, writing the book was probably the thing that kept us sane.

Awkward questions

We launched Written in January with a super event featuring the writer and broadcaster Oliver Burkeman who kindly wrote the foreword to the book. Since then, the book has been published in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. We’ve delivered webinars all over the world and have been lucky enough to be invited to speak at lots of events and on countless of podcasts. A couple of months ago we learned that the first print run of the book had sold out - yippee!

Being Brits, we often find asking favours a bit awkward (why be direct when you can beat around the bush?) but if you’d like to support our work, acknowledge our progress or just give us a helping hand, here’s what you can do:

👉 If you like this newsletter please hit the ❤️, leave us a comment, forward it to a writer in your life or share on social media - there’s five of our most read newsletters below.

👉 If you’ve read Written (and ideally, if you like it), please review the book on Amazon, Goodreads or a platform of your choosing. If that’s not your thing, just tell someone, we salute a word-of-mouth recommendations.

👉 If you like the sound of Written but haven’t yet bought a copy - please do. The hardback (which is a thing of beauty) is available for just £7.99 from Amazon in the UK. You can also get your local book shop to stock it or ask your library to order it. Don’t forget you can listen to the audio book or read the ebook via library apps - for free! It all counts.

Thank you so much. Bec & Chris

Written is brilliant for anyone interested in getting things done. It might be written with writers in mind, but if you’re remotely interested in starting any kind of creative hobby, project or activity and crucially, want to keep going then this is a great read.

- Harriet Moor, Moor Life Writing. Read the full review here.

Our 5 most read posts

1. Managing the procrastination problem

2. Unlock the block

3. Time management and accepting the impossible

4. No time to write? Here’s the solution

5. Writing goals: love them or loathe them?

If you like Breakthroughs & Blocks we’d be very grateful if you could leave a comment, share with your network or recommend the newsletter to a friend. Share our top reads, can you recommend us? It makes makes a huge difference - thank you!

1. We can all too often feel like Marie Curie who once said: “One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done." History has judged Curie’s achievements more kindly than she judged herself.