Imagine you are feeling unfit. You want to exercise, but you are nervous, out of shape, weak. So you decide you will read about exercise and visualize it until you feel ready to run or dance or lift weights. It’s easy to see how silly this is.
Sure, reading can be a great way to learn about an activity, and visualizing can surely help prepare us, but finally, we have to start—slowly—and build a practice, a physical practice, if we want to exercise. No sitting around, remote in hand, watching aerobic videos.
Writers are creative, dreamy folks, and it’s easy to spend a lot of time imagining ourselves writing. We can spend our advances many times over before we’ve even signed a contract, write acceptance speeches (in our heads, of course, not on actual paper) for awards we’re nowhere close to winning, rehearse interviews with Terri Gross about books we haven’t written.
But none of that will get us writing and none of that will help us overcome our secret, hidden shame and fear. We do not know if we can write. Are we good enough? Will we ever be? How dare we want to write? How dare we consider ourselves writers?
“Dare” is the right verb. Writing is scary. It takes great courage, and I’ve heard these questions from the mouths of some very well-published writers.
But here’s what you must do: write. Begin it. Get words on the page. Experience the strange and often wonderful alchemy as the rhythms of the words dictate themselves to you and come through your head and down to your fingers and onto the page. Characters surprise you. You surprise yourself.
Later, you read it back and don’t realize you wrote it. You read it one time and hate it; another time, it’s better than you thought. Don’t pay too much attention to those voices that haunt the writing process. The ones that discourage, that throw doubt. Hone in on the voice that’s telling your stories. Trust that. (With thanks to Jeanette Winterson.)
The other voices are scared. Why not? The voice that flows out when you listen, when you write, when you stop stopping and begin to transcribe, that is a powerful voice. The part of you that’s in charge of optimizing risk won’t think your writing is worthwhile. It’s terribly risky. Dangerous, even.
But you want to live dangerously. I know you do. That’s why you keep going in the face of fear and uncertainty and doubt, in the face of the cruelty you are capable of directing toward yourself. You want to risk more than you own, to do something valiant, to hit the right notes, to sometimes, just sometimes, make the words set the page alight.
Need some hand holding? Someone to say yes to your writing and also to hold you accountable? Someone to answer your questions about writing, revising, finishing, publishing? A glorious community climbing toward magnificent success? Classes start this week. Face-to-face anywhere in the world, via live video conferencing. Let me mentor you to success. Join us: https://bookwritingworld.com/mentor-me/