Busy Times, Busy Minds

I was reflecting today on how much posting my writing on this website has been helpful to me. Everyone's their own worst critic, and that couldn't be more true for me. However, putting things out there and getting them seen is really beneficial for several reasons.

For one, it requires vulnerability. If you want to be in the creative field, you have to get used to rejection, critique, and failure. It's easy to hide behind a wall of anonymity and never show your work, but if you want to push yourself and grow, you must. It's like putting a glass sculpture in the middle of a crowded daycare—it's going to get bonked. And that's okay. Rather, that's good for you.

Second, it puts some restraints on you. You can't keep sections in the mental clouds anymore, you can't keep "(write this later)" in the manuscript, you've got to try and write it! That's one of the most helpful things to learn: when to consider and brainstorm, and when to just write! I used to spend hours and hours worldbuilding, but wouldn't write. I had a cool world, perhaps, but you can't publish a world. And as cool as magic and countries and races are, people don't relate to those. They relate to characters.

And characters only grow when you write them. Get them down on a page; it doesn't matter if it's messy! Once it's down, once it's got bones to it, you can work with it, pull it, change it. You can't get a handle on a cloud. Putting your stuff out there—whether it be to friends, family, or a couple of strangers on the internet—will get you to write.

Dress for the job you want. Pretend you've got a drove of people waiting for your stories, if that's what you want to do with them. Don't delude yourself—be aware that there's a high chance you'll fail. But get excited! Rejoice in the small victories.

And you might find that along the way, you don't even need to get published to feel confident about your stories. You just need people to read them.

We overthink so many things. How we'll phrase a request, how we want to reword something, how we want the finale to feel, and too many times we do more thinking than actual doing. In basically all creative fields, it's better to just go. Get stuff out there. Get critiques. Learn to change, learn to not change.

Learn to flush all those thoughts that are bouncing around in your head down onto paper, and let them go.

Keep creating. It's good for you.