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How To Be Brave | Weekly Roundup

Medium creators’ responses to this week’s writing prompts

This week, many of you wrote to the Write Here prompts about advice you give but don’t follow, what keeps you from writing, and how to be more brave. And many of you joined our Creator Support Writing Hour and wrote with us! Honestly, that was pretty brave in and of itself. It can feel weird and vulnerable to share your writing, and sometimes it feels downright audacious just to set time aside to write, to say to your life: “Hey, this is important.” But if you don’t write, the writing never gets done. Weird, right?

Here are some of your responses that happen to also just be great advice and reminders for all of us:

“Enjoying life more” means something different for everyone

It took me many years to make peace with myself about the way I enjoy my life. Being fine with being the first to fall asleep at the teenager’s pajama parties. Being fine with preferring to go early to bed on a Friday night — in my 20s.
It took me a while to recognize that the way I enjoy life is not the cool way.
And to be happy with it.
Enjoying life more has been the advice I’ve never followed. At least not in the way my best friend meant it. — Oscar Díaz

Remember that we live in a noisy world, and that you have the power to tune out most of the noise

What do I mean by noise? That’s for you to decide. Anything that does not resonate with your dreams and goals is noise. Anything that drives you into fear or hopelessness is noise. Anyone trying to sell you something makes quite a racket. Anything that feels like a waste of time, probably is. — Jessica Wolf

Be as nice to yourself as you would be to a friend

I am really good at coaching other people to be easier on themselves. To stop their negative self-talk. To focus on their positive qualities.
I mean, life is short, right? Why pick yourself apart when you don’t need to?
We are all good at something. We all matter.
Don’t we?
And yet, I woke up this morning gazing in the mirror and thinking, “You look ugly today. Why can’t you get moving sooner and get some work done? You are useless.”
Stark difference between how I spoke to my friend and how I speak to myself, no? — Kelley Jhung

Sometimes blocks are about something deeper

It’s been years since I was freed from my abusive marriage. It took many years for me to even find words again to write. After that novel (which I did complete and had the certificate to prove it!), I didn’t write anything for most of a decade. The writing was ‘taken away’ from me by my ex because if it couldn’t be monetised, it wasn’t worth my time. Enter all of the conditioning that told me the talent I thought I might have was just people being polite about my work.
What I want most is to write a novel because I want to write a novel. It’s been a dream of mine ever since I was young. But, it scares me. My body has a physical response to the thought of it. My heart rate increases, my mouth gets dry and I have to gear up as if I’m going into a hostile situation when it comes to the actual writing. Some days aren’t that bad, but plenty of them are like that. And this only happens when it comes to writing that novel. I’ve had several false starts. — Ann van der Giessen

As a reminder, every Thursday through March 31, you can join me and my colleague Harris Sockel at 4:30 p.m. EST for an open writing hour. Spend that time to write to these prompts, polish up a Medium draft, or to work on a project of your own. You can use this meeting link to join (the passcode is: Medium). See you there.

Take a look at the Write Here topic page for more responses to recent prompts. Give people some claps if you like their stuff — it can really make a creator’s day.