Purpose: To share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds!

Posting: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. Post your thoughts on your own blog. Talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered. Discuss your struggles and triumphs. Offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writer – aim for a dozen new people each time – and return comments. This group is all about connecting! Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post.

Let’s rock the neurotic writing world!

Our Twitter handle is @TheIWSG and hashtag is #IWSG

July 5 Question: What is one valuable lesson you’ve learned since you started writing?

I think–and I keep having to learn this one over and over–that I’m learning that small goals add up over time. Novel writing isn’t so much a marathon as it’s a thousand sprints. It’s writing a little bit every day, as opposed to sitting down and writing a novel, or even sitting down and writing a chapter. You get up and write another page, or edit a page, and you get there, eventually.

I can’t say I always do that, but it’s a path that has begun to show results for me in other areas of my life–with building my blog, with my fitness goals–and with my writing and my revision. I may have been plagued by small goals when I was a kid–the kind of thing where you have a “project” for the day, and you wind up finishing it in a very short length of time. I’m trying to remember any point at which I would have been working on one thing for a semester or a year, and I’m coming up short.

The more I think about it, the more I see that most goals–the popular ones, the ones that everybody has–come pre-broken down. Baby-steps, until you lose track of the bigger thing that you’re aiming for in the distance.

If you lose track of the whole with novel writing, you don’t wind up with a whole.

The next step can be easy to lose track of in the enormity of the whole.