12/17/2023
Every single day someone asks me, "but what if I write it and it's bad?" And my answer is always the same: it will be...
..at least the first time around. Because no matter how hard good you are, how hard you try or who you know, the odds of you starting in the ~best possible place~ out of the infinite places you COULD start are, well, idk because I'm no good at math. But I'll bet they're pretty low. Don't sit around punishing yourself your whole life because you didn't win a veritable LOTTERY.
The cool thing, though, is that if you've read a lot, or written a lot, or talked a lot, or even just thought a lot, you probably have a pretty good feel for how words work. It's just that you've spent about 12 years getting all these "rules" thrown at you every time you sit down in front of that new page that you lock up, right?
So that first pass is data collection. It's where you have to step back and be impartial and just get the freaking data down in black and white - everything you've got up there in your head about it, even the stuff you don't realize you know until you get started. You can't have critics coming in and stopping the study or experiment every five minutes, right? It's the same thing. Just let it run its course and them go figure out what's there and what to do with it.
Because that's the part where it gets fun. Where you get to take that weird stuff you learned in AP English or whatever and put it to use. Where you get to sit back and figure out why something isn't working. Where you get to reflect and converse with the person you were when you wrote it down, even if that's just a few minutes ago. You were a little younger then. Knew a little less about the world. Explore that, get curious, figure it out.
And then when you get to the point where you're taking commas out and putting them back in, send it out into the world and walk away. Forget about it. Go start something new to worry about because there's nothing you can do about it now. People are always the unknown variable, no matter what you're doing, and your audience will likely be made up mostly of them, so it's simply out of your hands. But that's actually pretty cool, because it frees up so much space in your life for other, more interesting things.
So go do those, while you wait, because if the application, or article, or degree, or job, or novel, or WHATEVER doesn't work out, having something interesting going on is going to make that hurt so much less than it would orherwise.
