Take the Intimidation Out of Writing
📝 This Week’s Goal: Reassess our writing mindsets to make writing fun again
Hey all, Margery Bayne here. Your friendly librarian by day and writer by night. You may know me from my series “The Short Of It” which is all about the writing and publishing of short stories. If not, hello! Outside my series, I also cover writing motivation, productivity, and a sprinkling of other topics. Fiction-wise, I am a published short story author and aspiring novelist who likes to write speculative, character-focused works. But enough about me…
Today I want to talk to you about a non-short story topic: pressure. We writers can put a lot of pressure on ourselves. It comes from hustle culture. It comes from comparing ourselves to the other writers we see completing their 50,000 word NaNoWriMo goals or professing the power of publishing 10+ articles per week. It comes from within ourselves. With all this pressure, we transform writing from a craft — that, yes, takes hard work and dedication like any skill worth honing — into a burden. Where sitting down at the keyboard is something we are intimidated by rather than finding joy in all the things that likely drew us to writing in the first place: communicating an idea, weaving a narrative, or stringing together a beautiful line of words.
This year, this month, this week… it’s time to find joy in writing again, or at least sap some of the intimidation out of it. That will look different for each one of us writers. Maybe it’s stepping back and reevaluating your writing practices. Maybe it’s going easier on yourself. Maybe it’s finding an easier way of doing things. Maybe it’s making sure to inject some mindfulness and self-care into your life at large. I, for one, am going to stop obsessively tracking my word count output and focus on project goals instead.
💬 How are you going to discover or rediscover the joy in writing this year? Share in a comment!
👀 Read more from The Writing Cooperative on making writing easier.
Take Every Opportunity to Make Writing The Littlest Deal Possible by Taylor Foreman
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How to be a Grab-and-Go Writer by David Majister
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New Year’s Resolutions Are Hard. Create Quarterly Projects Instead. by Nick Wolny
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