Do you feel you need permission to write? I’m here to tell you, you don’t need permission.

Click the video below to find out why you don’t need permission to write.

Hello my lovely writers, how are you? 

You want to be a writer. You want to be a writer but you keep putting off your writing, you find it hard to get to the desk, you find it hard to get to the page and to get your butt in that chair. 

One thing I’ve realised about a lot of writers is they struggle because they’ve not given themselves permission to write. 

So, if you need to hear this, I’m giving you permission. 

You have permission to write

You have permission to write. You are allowed to write. If it’s something that gives you joy, if there’s a bit of your brain that says you need to write – either on a daily or a weekly basis – then you have permission to do it. You don’t need anybody else’s permission. 

You don’t need my permission but, if you need to hear that, I’m giving permission to you so you can feel good about getting to the page and so you don’t feel guilty about wanting to write. 

When we think about other people who do things they enjoy, like go to the gym, go running, play golf, go to a tap-dancing class or go to the cinema, whatever it is, they don’t feel guilty about it. 

Writing is important to us

They don’t feel they need permission from other people to do these activities, so why do we writers often feel we need permission to take ourselves off and spend a little time by ourselves and our characters? Spend our time not doing any harm to anybody else, not taking anything from anybody else but simply being allowed to express ourselves in word form, which is important to us. 

There’s dance, there’s sculpture, there’s art, there’s crochet, there are so many other artistic forms but, for us, it’s the written word. We love writing. We love telling stories. We want to put our stories together, put our books together and share something with the world. 

You don’t need permission to do that. But just in case you do, I’m giving it to you. You have permission to do something that gives you joy, that makes you happy, that is a personal challenge and a step towards the dream life you want to live. 

So, you have permission to write. Get writing. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is an author mindset coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer’s block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

You don’t need to be a perfect writer to find the perfect reader. You are already good enough!

Click the video below to find out why you don’t need to be a better writer than everybody else – you just need some self-belief.

Hello my lovely writers. 

I wanted to talk today about the myth that, as a writer, you’ve got to be better than everybody else in order to find readers or get that book deal, or get published and find your Amazon fans. 

I want to let you know that it really isn’t true. You don’t have to be the best. 

You don’t need to be a perfect writer

You have to be good enough and many writers are good enough. 

They don’t aspire to be the Pulitzer Prize winner or the writer of a generation. They want to share stories and get a message across to their readers. Whether the message is about love, justice, or the climate – whatever it might be, there’s a message somebody wants to share through their books. 

You don’t have to be perfect to do that. You just have to know enough.

And you have to get started.

You need self-belief

You must have the self-belief in your own voice and your own capabilities to bring that story to life and take your readers on an adventure. 

When you do that, it doesn’t matter the level of skill you’ve got. What matters is that you touch someone’s heart, you speak to them soul to soul and you speak to them on an emotional level, not on a ‘Wow, their grammar’s great,’ level. That’s not what people are looking for. Readers don’t care about that – they just want a good, smooth read. 

If you can relate to your characters, bring them to life and show them the empathy they need, your reader is going to connect with them and that is going to find you your number one fans and the people who will continue to come back to you time and time again because they know they’re going to get a brilliant story from you. 

It’s not being better than anybody else that’s going to get you your readers and get you where you want to be. It is getting the words on the page and trusting that you are good enough. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is an author mindset coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer’s block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

As a writer, do you think AI is cheating? I don’t! I use AI all the time. Watch the video below to find out why I use AI and how AI is beneficial to writers.

Hello my lovely writers. 

I have made the conscious decision to embrace AI, which you may or may not have seen me doing. I know some of you are reticent about using it, you may even be anti-AI and aggressive about not using it, but I wanted to give my argument as to why I think AI is beneficial to writers and is a tool we should all be embracing. 

First of all, the biggest elephant in the room is that it’s here. It’s here to stay and, no matter what people are saying right now, it’s going to increasingly be part and parcel of the way we write and how we create our stories and put them out into the world. It’s going to be a more and more integral part of our authorpreneur journey. 

AI is here to stay

AI is here, it’s there, it’s not going away. We have to accept it. 

One of the things that made me decide to embrace AI is that I remember when Kindle came out and the first ebooks were available on Amazon. I distinctly remember being at my grandparents’ house and having this conversation with my parents and my grandparents about how – and this is my own snobbery here – I didn’t think ebooks would take off. E-publishing was for people who couldn’t get an agent and wasn’t real publishing. 

Oh, how wrong I was. How, how wrong I was. Self-publishing is not a substitute for finding an agent and a traditional deal, it’s an alternative. Now here I am, going down that route myself. I was very slow on the uptake of self-publishing, I missed the golden years of that and now I’m playing catch-up, so I’ve made the conscious decision that I don’t want to make that same mistake with artificial intelligence. I want to be using it. It’s here to stay. It’s not going anywhere, it’s just going to get better and better and more and more used to the point where we can’t tell the difference if AI is being used or not. 

Writing books using AI is a creative endeavour

I want to be part of that. I want to use that technology and those tools that can help me. AI is beneficial to writers and I would even argue that writing books using AI is a creative endeavour. It’s a form of creation. Those people may not be sitting down with a pen and paper and writing their first draft by hand but they are being the creative director of the story they’re putting out into the world. 

They are coming up with the initial idea or they’re brainstorming with ChatGPT or Claude, or whoever it is they use. They’re brainstorming, they’re making decisions, they get to be the creative director on their project. They determine what’s going to be used, what’s not, which direction the story is going to take, how it’s going to be refined, how it’s going to be finessed, the types of characters they want to use, the types of stories they want to use, the tone and the voice they want the AI machine to use. All of that is going to be within their creative control and they’ll be the creative director of that book, rather than necessarily being the author of that book. 

Where I love to use AI

I don’t necessarily want to go down that route. One of the things I love about writing is that hand-to-brain thing of writing my books, that’s what I enjoy. I enjoy that first drafting. However, where I do love to use AI and where I think AI is beneficial to writers is that I can take a plotline I’ve got, feed it into AI and ask, ‘What do you think? Where are the plot holes in this? Where can you see things that don’t match up in this?’ and it will bounce back to me, ‘I can see a plot hole here, here and here.’ 

Sometimes it will come back to me and say, ‘You’ve got something a bit obvious here as well. Maybe you need to think up something a bit more original,’ and if I can’t think of something, I can ask, ‘Can you help me out?’ and it will give me some ideas. 

Sometimes the idea is in and of itself really good and I can incorporate it. Sometimes it’s a great trigger for an idea I can fit in the story. So, as a planning tool, something to plot a story with and see if that plan or that plot has major holes in it, I can use AI for that. 

I’ve also fed my book into AI and said, ‘Can you tell me what tropes are used in this? Can you tell me the tone of this book?’ and asked it to give me feedback on the book I’ve written. That feedback I can then use in advertising and in my ad copy. I can use it in different ways like that as it gives me more insight into the work I’m doing. 

AI is beneficial to writers

Blurbs are such a difficult thing for authors to write and so I use AI to help me with blurbs. There’s a multitude of ways in which you can use AI and I really encourage you not to cut your nose off to spite your face because you believe the old ways are the best. Be inquisitive about AI. You’re a writer, you’re an observer, you’re interested in the world and how it works so be inquisitive about it. You don’t have to incorporate any of these things, you don’t have to use them in your writing, but nor do you get to dismiss that other people are using these tools to help them in a way that works. 

AI is not going away, it’s going to be here for the long haul, it’s going to increasingly be part of everything we do. Don’t miss the boat on this. Don’t get left behind. I know that often we don’t like change. I don’t like change very often and that was why I was reticent to get on board with Amazon but I don’t want to be so far behind the curve this time. I want to try and keep up this time. I want to see how AI can benefit me and how it can be useful to me and help me. 

You know yourself that, with writing and being an authorpreneur, there are a lot of hats to wear. Not only are you the writer but you are the marketer, the business person and the CEO. With all of these things we have to do and all of these hats we have to wear, if I can use an AI tool to help me with some of those to help me along the way and use AI as a critique partner, a sounding board or as a way to brainstorm, I’m all for it. If AI is going to help me write a better story that readers will like and want to read, I’m going to go for it. 

Using AI is not cheating

I know some of you are resistant and some of you are nervous about it but I do encourage you to be inquisitive about AI. Open your ears, have a listen, see what other people are saying and see what other people are doing. How could you use this tool to make your life better without feeling like you are cheating, without feeling you’re losing your integrity? 

Remember, even if you choose to write your book using entirely AI, you’re still the creative director. It’s still your name on the page and it’s still your ideas that are coming to the forefront. 

This is a fun new era. It’s going to change everything and that’s really exciting. We’re just going to write in different ways, tell our stories in different ways and use these new tools to help us do that. 

I hope you can see where I’m coming from. I hope it’s going to give you a little bit of encouragement to be open to AI and see where it goes and see how you can maybe use AI to enhance your own authorpreneur life. 

Emma xx 

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is an author mindset coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer’s block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

Writers are storytellers. We just need to tell the story. Watch the video below to find out how looking at photos of my cats got me thinking about the similarities between cats and writers and how they can teach us to just tell the story.

Hello my lovely writers, how are you? 

This morning, I was looking at photographs of my cats, as cat lovers do, and thinking about how beautiful they are, just as they are. Cats don’t try to be something they’re not. They don’t put on airs and graces for the family or the other cats with whom they live. They simply are. They simply exist. They do their thing. 

Writers are storytellers

That got me thinking about writers and how we need to just do our thing as well. We don’t need to try to impress anybody. Writers are storytellers and we have our own unique story to tell. We’ve just got to tell the story. Just telling the story – that was one thing a theatre director of mine used to say. He’d say to us when we were in rehearsal, ‘Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t try to make this part or this play be something it’s not. You’re just telling the story. Keep it simple.’ It’s a phrase I come back to a lot in everything I do. I keep saying to myself, ‘Writers are storytellers. Just tell the story. Keep it simple. Don’t overcomplicate it. Don’t worry about things you don’t need to worry about. Just tell the story.’ 

Unlock Your Creative Block

If you need help just telling the story, check out my course, Unlock Your Creative Block and see how you can come and work with me. I’ll help you unlock the creative blocks you’ve got so you can break past writer’s block and tell your story. 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is an author mindset coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer’s block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!

Trust the process. That’s what my physiotherapist said to me and it occurred to me that we, as writers, also need to trust the process.

Watch the video below to find out why.

Hello my lovely writers, how are you? 

I’m just back from physio and my physiotherapist gave me a timely reminder and a bit of tough love, just gently, by reminding me that the physio exercises I’m doing and what I’m working towards – which is getting rid of these headaches – takes time. 

It’s a marathon, not a sprint. 

I’ve got to start small and steady and just keep building up on it. 

I said to him, ‘But I get scared. I’m scared that if I do this exercise, I’m going to get a headache and it’s going to make things worse and then I pull back from it because I get scared.’ 

The magic words he said to me were, ‘You might bring on a headache but you need to do the work in order to strengthen the muscles.’ He said, ‘You’ve got to trust the process.’ 

It’s a marathon, not a sprint

I laughed because I thought that’s exactly the same for writing. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. You start small and steady and you build yourself up. It’s going to be painful at times.

You have to go through those painful times, those difficult times, when the words aren’t coming, when you feel you’ve got no ideas or you don’t know what’s going to happen next in the story. 

You’ve got to do it anyway. You’ve got to push through it because that’s how your writing muscle gets stronger. 

Writing is a muscle, just like a physical muscle is. Your writing muscle gets stronger by getting your butt in the chair or wandering around dictating, however it is you get your words down. You’ve got to do it even when it feels difficult, when it’s hard work and you don’t really want to do it. If you can push yourself through, you’re going to get stronger and stronger every time you do it. 

Trust the process

Trust the process, just like I’m trusting my physio and the process he’s putting me through. That’s how you get stronger. It’s the same for your physical muscles as it is for your writing muscle. You’ve got to keep going. 

I’ll say it to you as he said it to me, trust the process. Are you trusting? 

Emma xx

Emma Dhesi

Emma Dhesi is an author mindset coach and bestselling author who helps writers let go of perfectionism, self-doubt and writer’s block through her signature programme, Unlock Your Creative Block.

She is the host of the YouTube Channel, Emma Dhesi, where she interviews debut and experienced authors alike.

Through her 1:1 coaching programme, Emma helps new authors start and finish their first novel.

Emma provides personal written feedback on their pages and guides them through the emotional rollercoaster that is writing a novel!