We need to start before we're ready
and why waiting for the right moment is detrimental to our growth
I get stuck writing this newsletter a lot. My lack of posts for the first month of starting my Substack wasn’t due to laziness. It wasn’t even procrastination, given that I sat in front of the blank page wanting to write, but no words would come to me. The problem isn’t a lack of ideas either—I have a whole list of them sitting on my desk, and I look at it every day.
My problem is a fear of failure. Surprise, surprise.
You’d think writing a newsletter, for someone who considers herself a writer, would come easy. But though I’ve written novels, edit novels for a living, and have published creative non-fiction before, I’ve never been a blogger. And writing a newsletter feels like blogging but in a more intimate way.
Here I am, in your inbox, every week, completely by your choice, hoping to say something inspiring, something worth your time. And that’s where the pressure comes in. That’s when the fear of failure—oh so familiar—gets triggered.
I genuinely want to be able to connect with my readers. My hopes are that through this newsletter I’ll be able to reach like minds and build a small community with whom I can keep connecting with. Maybe that sounds like a line. Maybe it sounds like a marketing strategy where I try to appeal to your softer side in order to pique your interest.
But I’ve always had less than a handful of writer (or even creative) friends—a situation I attribute mostly to having suffered crippling social anxiety my whole life. And I want that for myself now. Now that I’ve done the work, now that I can actually hold a conversation with other people without shutting down, I want to give myself the opportunity to meet other creatives and to be able to offer a space I wish had been offered to me whenever I’d felt scared and insecure before.
But I do worry about offering something of substance. I worry about wasting your time. I worry about rambling incoherently and you rolling your eyes and closing this page.
This fear stumps me. It’s the same fear that has kept me from starting/finishing my WIPs before, where I rather dream of what my writing could sound like, rather than put pen to paper and begin the ambitious and demanding job of carving out a scene from words. Hours of work just to hate what I come up with at the end.
But the thing is, if I want the finished, polished novel I have to first get through the messy, crappy drafts. I’m never going to create scenes that twinkle and shine without first trudging through the muck of incoherent prose and choppy dialogue.
Likewise, writing a newsletter will never get easier for me if I avoid it. It won’t get easier until I start because it’s only when I start that I’ll begin learning what not to do.
Sure, we can take loads of classes and courses, go down rabbit holes of niched information, watch every YouTube video available, and speak to every professional you can find. But your experience won’t be uniquely yours until you get out there and start figuring out how you’re going to handle problems in your own way and in your own style.
Much like with my editing business, there are many things I learned only by doing. Though I took numerous courses, attend monthly coaching calls, read literature on the craft of editing, and regularly dip my hands into anything editing-related to make sure I stay in the know, nothing could prepare me for that first edit on Google Docs where the author decided to follow as I posted my comments in real-time (writers, please don’t do this). I wasn’t prepared for them to counter-argue my notes before I myself had decided how to properly word my advice. Or the fact that clients can ghost you. Or how to best price my services according to what I feel is fair to my level of expertise but that also meets my financial goals.
There have been tons of nuanced issues in my practice that I know were situations I wouldn’t have learned from a book or course. Whenever I encounter a moment like this, before spiraling into a vortex of self-blame and criticism, I have to take a moment and remind myself that it’s all part of the learning process.
Because here’s the other thing: the new “endeavour”—whatever it may be—will only be interesting to me as long as I still have something to learn. Conquering a new skill is always most thrilling when everything’s still new. But once I know everything, it becomes repetitive. That’s when I start feeling stuck. That’s when the rut begins to form. And though trying something new can be nerve-wracking, my fear of being stuck in a rut can get pretty dark pretty fast. I’d rather be overcome by the nerves of taking some new risk every day for the rest of my life than feel like I’m just going through the motions. (I’ve been there before. It’s one of the least fun places my mind has ever visited.)
So here’s my advice for this week: Start before you’re ready. Be willing to stumble. Be willing to fall flat on your face. Be willing to hurt. Be willing to cringe at your own mistakes. Be willing to embrace the side of you that is purely human, who came into this existence as a blank page, open and eager to let life flow through you like a refreshing evening breeze.
You will never be fully ready, and that’s just the hard truth. The quicker you accept this, the quicker you’ll be able to start experiencing life to its fullest—the good, the bad, the ugly, and everything that falls in between.
currently inspiring me
In the future, I’ll probably have to make a post discussing how it’s almost impossible for me to do anything creative, writing most of all, without music. And I don’t just mean the act of listening to music while I work, but also, listening to music to help me find my muse, to feed the images in my mind that later become words. Whether it’s the lyrics doing it or just the vibe of the music, I do wonder if I could actually be a writer if music didn’t exist—it’s that important to my creative process.
I’ve recently discovered Paris Paloma whose music style is right up my alley (if you haven’t heard “labour” I implore you to check it out. It’s an absolute masterpiece). But more recently, I’ve found myself enthralled by the sounds Paris Paloma offers in “notre dame.” It’s got a great haunting feel and dark undertones to go with some of the scenes I’ve been writing. I’d love to go on about her entire discography, but we’ll start with this song for now.
literary moment of the week
As I was writing this post, this poem kept coming to mind. More specifically the lines “Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.” I have these lines written on the first page of my journal. It was a reminder I set for myself years ago, but it’s only in recent years that I’ve truly begun to grasp their meaning. I’ve tried to touch on some of it in this post, on the importance of understanding that the imperfections and complications of life are just as important as the moments of ease and joy.
Hi there, I’m Maria! I’m a freelance fiction editor assisting women writers in amplifying their voices through their writing. You can find me on Instagram @theintuitivedesk. Or visit my site
www. theintuitivedesk.com to find out more.
I’m also a writer currently working on too many novels at the same time. You can read some of my past writings here.
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