You're new to Steem. New to blogging. New to writing. I get it. Me too.
I started writing when I was a bohemian teenager. I used to write stories, extremely short but powerful in narrative (in my 16-years-old-me opinion) and I would sometimes post them on Facebook, sometimes keep them to myself.
I really enjoyed writing, and I only did it when I was hit by 'the muse'.
Then I grew older, started college, then quit college to start working (to pay my own recently acquired bills, rent, etc.) and eventually one day, stopped writing.
Five years[ * ] have gone by and despite my attempts to write again, I wasn't able to write a single text. Instead, I thought about it -- a lot.
This is what I learnt
- 'The muse' won't just hit you.
Just waiting for an idea to come up to you by some mystical reason rarely works. Nothing interesting ever happend to you just by waiting. Never happened to me in these five years. You shouldn't wait for anything to write. It's actually simple: in order to write, you have to start writing.
Then maybe you just won't nail it, or you won't finish your composition, but you'll have at least something. You'll make your brain and your body working towards that direction, and ideas will start popping up.
You know that corny quote:
“Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.”
- You're neither good nor bad. You are yourself.
Most of the times that I tried writing, I would find myself reviewing my just kind-of-finished tale about some random idea I had, and having thoughts like this: this is total crap.
Does that ever happened to you? I'm sure it does.
We all tend to be insecure about our creations. I sure do.
I overcame this situation by breaking it down to it's root, and I found out the reason we think what we do is not good enough is because we compare ourselves to other people, mainly to our favorite authors. An there's the thing. I realiezed I was comparing myself to professional writers, people that had spent their entire life writing and making a living of it.
Right now I wish I found that out sooner. Please, notice: that comparison is unfair. It just doesn't make any sense.
In my humble opinion, you shouldn't compare to anyone. Never. It's just enormously useless. Why? Because every single person in this planet has it's unique personal experience, and that's where their content comes from.
So that means you're unique too. What I did was stop comparing myself to others, and started learning from others and from my past mistakes instead. That gives you the chance to understand that your content is neither better nor worse than anybody else's; it's just yours.
And this realization led me to the idea that brought me back to the Steem community and back to writing:
- Mistakes are good.
It doesn't matter if you're a gifted writer or just a normal person as myself. You will make mistakes. But that's a good thing!
Mistakes are what makes us human. Every action you throw into the large ocean of the universe is an attempt to affect it and recieve energy from it. You making mistakes is the way you learnt to walk, talk -- write.
If you want to get better, you have to learn from your mistakes.
Embrace them as your allies. That's what I did.
Back in the time when I did use to write, I would finish a story and post it without any reviews. I'm not proud of that, but then when I read my finished content, I would find all kinds of stuff that I could have done different -- but that was OK!
Next time I would write something, I would use those ideas to improve my storytelling. And it was awesome.
I think the main reason I stopped writing was because of being afraid of exposure. I didn't want to feel vulnerable. One day I found this TED Talk and it blowed my mind, like if some enormous weight had been taken from me.
Vulnerability is the source of your creativity. I keep that always in mind.
Finally, my advice would be:
Write yourself, read yourself, be yourself.
.
.
What about you?
Have you ever faced any of this issues? If yes, what is your way of fighting them?
Let me know in the commments!
[ * ] At the moment of writing that sentence I realized that 5 years is an huge amount of time and just started to freak out for a minute. Then I just chilled.