Writing Life: Start Before You’re Ready
I was not ready. I am not ready now. I will never be ready.
Oh well. I started anyway.
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Let’s talk about rough drafts. There’s a lot of ways to write one. Some people like to start with a meticulously crafted outline, complete with Roman numerals or alternating dots, dashes, and stars. Others prefer using index cards, which can range from simple white rectangles on a pin board to a splay of every neon color Office Max has ever sold scattered over the entirety of the linoleum kitchen floor because that’s the only space that has enough room in your home and oh God would someone please help with the dog why was he let out of his kennel shit now half your cards are in a crumpled mess under the cabinets.
…But if you get it right, it looks fantastic on TikTok.
Personally, I find it useful to just tackle the page head on with whatever nonsense might be vaguely related to the topic at hand. Doesn’t matter what I put on the page, as long as the resulting initial paragraph waves its hand at my thesis while it speeds along 15 over the speed limit and unable to choose a lane.
Let’s look at an example. The topic is ‘Why you should start something you’re passionate about before you are ready.’ The goal is to address this well-worn topic with honesty and a fresh take. Difficult to do with any subject that has been examined by thousands of people over many years, but worth a shot. Here’s my first attempt to go at it:
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Okay, I need to write, oh my gods, what do I even want to fucking tell these people? That I’m struggling so damn hard? That I’m losing my gods-be-damned-fucking mind? I dunno! I wanna tell people this is the scariest damn thing I’ve ever done. I wanna say I’ve never been busier. I have lived a life where I have been trapped and invalidated by so many people and situations, it is just fucking straight up WEIRD to be spreading my wings! My mom invalidated the struggles I had with my sexuality and gender identity, my work places have invalidated my difficulties with social politics and navigating people in general, my friends who I now call exes invalidated my limited energy levels and inability to balance self-care with everything that’s demanded of able-bodied, neurotypical adults—because I wasn’t one, funny that! That life saw me curling up in bed more often than not. Now I’m stepping out, and it’s fucking HARD to do what I’m doing. It’s fucking hard to work at an emotionally demanding job, even if it is part time; take care of a house and the husband and pets that live with me; deal with all my mental, emotional, and physical ailments; be an MFA student; build up my author platform; and start a non-profit—all coming to a head within the last three months! WOO!
My therapist, psychiatrist, and psychiatric evaluator all say I’m not crazy. I think they’re wrong just by virtue of the fact that I have all three of them in my life, but if that wasn’t the case, everything above would still prove my point.
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As a panic attack, 10/10. As a blog post, nowhere near hitting the mark.
But does that matter? I got words on the page. No, they’re not the words that I want to leave my audience with by a mile, but every good workout needs to start with a warm-up. My fingers are moving, and my brain is angled toward the general direction of the task at hand.
So what’s next? Certainly not the final draft.
Instead, we’ll take stab at a draft that looks closer to what I might actually post.
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I want to be inspirational. Say what everyone else has said about starting before you’re actually ready is the good advice it sounds like. Assure people the difficulties you’ll come across are equal to the difficulties that would come if you had a perfect plan with the perfect mentor and the perfect team all lined up, so why wait for perfection?
All of that is true. But I can only say that through instinct, right? Because I’ve never had the perfect circumstances. Moments, sure, but moments, by definition, do not fucking last. So…yeah, the advice out there is still right. You can’t be ready. Not perfectly ready. So just get started. You can’t finish if you don’t start. Hell, you can’t be interrupted half way by life or death if you don’t start. Just start.
Even if it’s scary as fuck. And even if you might look like a fool. And even if it will challenge everything that you perceive about your own identity and values and work ethic.
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Better. Personally, I like that I’m retaining my honesty, but I’ve toned down the explosion of feelings that I had at the beginning of this project. We’ve got a little structure going here, thesis paired with insight.
But I’m still not done. It’s not long enough, it doesn’t have as fresh a take as I would like, there are elements that are still too unrefined, it…it needs more.
Writing this blog feels like it’s taken forever already, and yet the time has passed too swiftly for me to understand what ‘forever’ even means anymore. Just that there’s not enough of it to get the perfect essay on the page…
But we move forward. Next draft.
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There are a lot of essays and blogs out there that talk about the ‘nose to the grindstone’ beauty of starting before you’re ready. Sure, they admit that it will be hard! Sure, they concede you’ll come up against problems that you can’t anticipate and things will get messy and you won’t always have the answers.
I can’t say that I have read one that really shows what that looks like, though. How does someone who is wrapped up in the idea of needing just one more thing to fall in place, read one more book on craft or the business, attend one more conference with deific experts who started where we are right now and made it work…how does someone move past the need for ‘one more’ and take the leap? What does that look like? Because it doesn’t feel as simple as “It looks like what it looks like. Just do it.” No, come on, the world is dangerous and competitive and we have bills to pay. And how do you do all this by yourself? And isn’t success based on a modicum of luck? Luck? Get started on a goal that you have your heart set on and hope that luck shows up sometime to make it fly?
…Yeah. I guess that is what it looks like. Getting started and hoping it’ll fly.
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I like this a lot. It’s reflective of how I got started nearly two decades ago, posting my writing on deviantArt and gaining a small following. I got fan art for the first time in my life. Fan art. It doesn’t feed you, but the lift it gives to your soul, getting that first piece of someone else’s soul in visual form because they love what you lovingly crafted so much.
But that didn’t last. dA was fun, but adulthood struck me hard and fast. So that draft is also reflective of how I got started again a few years later, self-publishing one of the books that I had first drafted on dA. Through word of mouth, I sold 186 copies of that book. Not bad for a $200 premade cover and a couple friends as editors.
Then life happened, my mental health crumbled, and I couldn’t move on that momentum. So years after that, I started writing on Tapas. Built an audience of around 2,000, self-published three books, sold a total of 541. Not bad. Not bad at all.
And then life happened again. It’s always happening. And while I’d just seen more success than I ever had before, I didn’t have a steady enough foundation, and there were people in my life who actively wanted to see me fall. It happens. You can’t start without knowing that things can end for any number of reasons.
That doesn’t mean it can’t start again, though. I’ve found the right people. I’ve worked on my confidence. I’ve worked on my craft. I’ve studied and I’ve cared and I’ve reflected.
Now I’m starting again. Not because I’m perfect, not because the time is right, not because I have all the best tools at my disposal. I’m starting again because…I have one life. I have my time, I don’t know when it’s up, and I love writing. I love crafting worlds, I love the capacity for self-expression, I love helping others become better at writing and learning how to get their work out there. Falling over and over just means I haven’t had an easy time reaching my goals. Oh well. Growing and learning means that you occasionally suck at what you’re doing. But you can’t get good at it if you don’t start.
I was not ready. I am not ready now. I will never be ready.
But I started anyway. Now I’m better at it than I was. Someday I’ll be better than I am. Specifically because I started anyway.
Someday I’ll finish my thoughts about starting before you’re ready. But I’m in the middle of it right now, and that’s a good place to be.
~TJ Willis
