When you push past the bullshit
Confused, overwhelmed, exhausted. Frustrated, resentful, burned out. Unsure, hesitant, sacred shitless… blocked.
Feelings we experience when we step up and go for it.
Yes, everyone.
No, it’s not permanent.
Hustle through it. Or cry, whine, beg and pray through it. Either way, it will pass. And once it does, you’ll find confidence, inspiration, excitement, and a bunch of other awe-inspiring shit. Don’t take my word for it, though.
Oh, and they have a message for you, too: Anyone can do it.
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What did they learn?
If you want your work to be noticed, you have to use words that get noticed. That doesn’t mean swearing (that would be me). It means being you. It means writing without hedging. It means every time you think, Oh my God, I can’t say that, you better motherf*cking say it.
Take off the goddamn tie and nylons, break out your best black lace thong and let it all hang out.
And then you might think … But that doesn’t feel like business.
I know. Thank the gods. If it felt like business, you wouldn’t be opening up and connecting with people. And if you don’t open up and connect, if you aren’t vulnerable, your readers aren’t going to give a shit about what you say.
You have to wade through the fear to get to the good stuff.
You have to show people who you are and why they should care. Otherwise, your just one of a billion or so writers without a message that stands out. Rather than the author who throws her guts on the page and makes her words sing.
I don’t know about you, but I’ll take a little fear any day of the week if it leads to something lasting for my readers. To know that every time I crack open my chest and put it on the page, someone says, ‘Oh, it’s not just me?’ That’s success by any measure.
So, show some skin. Strip your words down to what your gut says is true. But first, check out what other writers have to say about it.
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Rebecca, wonderful posts. Putting yourself out there is really hard. What is far more difficult, I think, is being quiet and drowning in things unsaid, becoming the proverbial frog that boils in a pot of simmering water.
Honesty takes practice. I don’t know if anyone cares about what I have to say. I don’t know if the advice and thoughts I give out mean anything to anyone. Sometimes I feel like no one could possibly find me interesting, but I try anyway. I suspect a lot of people feel like that.
I am writing my second manuscript. My first was shit. I learned a lot from other authors, but I still have problems with trying to get a good story out of all the nonsense I am writing down. How do you sift through and decide what stays and what goes?
Hi 🙂
Anything – act, sigh, line, description – that does not move the story forward must go.
Agreed. Even those sentences, paragraphs, pages, and entire chapters that you’ve sweated and cried and slaved over, polishing and honing until the words were “just right,” a masterpiece of creative writing — if, as Rebecca said, it does not move the story forward: DELETE.
I did that with my first (and only, so far) published novel. I nearly had my book finished, when I realized that several of my chapters did nothing but slow down the action, so I took them all out. It HURT to do that. I thought about all the wasted hours and days of hard effort that went into the work I was deleting. But WOW, it made my story so much better.
I did save those deleted chapters in a separate file, “just in case” I could use them somewhere else some day, which of course I never did. But it made the deleting a little less painful.