How I Started My Writing Journey
And the Five Steps that helped me with it.
Hello Everyone,
Welcome back! This time, I am going to keep it straight and simple!
I like to write.
But I never started writing anything online. I wanted to start blogging since the day I heard about it but never did. I kept on planning, but those plans remained just that. Plans! I never went ahead with the execution.
Reason?
Honestly, I am not sure. It was the amalgamation of every possible excuse you can think of. Sometimes, it was the lack of confidence, sometimes procrastination, and sometimes the inability to find the right platform. In short, as I said, every possible excuse. The fact that I am a bit Lazy wasn’t helpful as well.
But this year, I conquered everything and started my writing journey. How did I do it? Well, that’s what I want to discuss in this post. I hope that it makes sense to you.
The Nudge:
What was that one moment which made me consider myself as a writer?
I was not sure if I could be a writer. I like reading, but will I be able to write anything? I was never sure of it. But one day, I came across a thought on Facebook.
“Writers aren’t who write but the ones who think.”
And that made me think: I am a thinker. A big-time thinker. That day, I understood that writing is only a medium to convey. To be a writer, you must be a thinker. If you have thoughts and ideas in your mind, then you only need to learn how to convey them properly. The day you learn that you are good to go.
The day I understood it, was the day I took a great leap forward. But it was not a single day’s work. It expanded to a few months, where I had to keep working on it. Although the whole journey felt like a long marathon to me, if you want me to summarize it, I can say that it took me five steps from start to finish.
Those were not the steps exactly but the problems and hurdles that I faced during this journey and how I worked through them. It took me some time to understand and resolve them. I had to form a workaround for every step, but if you ask, I must say that I have learned a lot from this journey. And that is the reason I want to share it with you. Hopefully, that will be helpful.
Let me take you through those steps.
The First Step:
My first step was to start documenting.
One thing that I had to struggle with most was not the lack of new thoughts but keeping them with me. Why? Because humans can forget. And the last I checked; I am a human. So, I used to have a lot of ideas and thoughts that I wanted to share, but I always forgot them. Many of them were good, but I was unable to share them with anyone as I forgot.
And once I forgot, I tried to recall them, but that version wasn’t as good as the original.
Hence, I started documenting every thought I considered worth saving. I confess that I discarded many when I looked again, but it’s better to have a lot of ideas to discard than to have nothing.
The Second Step:
The second step was to expand upon those thoughts.
Once you have the ideas, start expanding them. Put on your thinking cap and start exploring your thoughts. Write whatever you want to write on that idea. Don’t think if it is good or bad, just go with it and put your thoughts on the paper/digital paper. Remember that whatever you write in this step is your “First Draft” and the first draft doesn’t need to be perfect.
The Third Step:
Oh, the third step.
It was the hardest. Why? Because here, I had to convince myself that I had the skills to be a writer. It’s one of the hardest things to convince yourself of your talent when you are in doubt. I faced the same dilemma. I always knew that my mind generates multiple thoughts, and a few of them are shareable, but putting them in words was something where I lacked confidence. Hence, this was the step I struggled with the most.
How did I overcome this? Well, I took a shortcut. I still do it.
I don’t write for everyone; I write for one person. I chose one person who enjoyed my writing and started writing only for her. It took the load off my shoulder. Now, I didn’t have to get validation from the whole world. I had to get it from only one. So, if you are struggling with the same, remember: You need just one person as your audience.
I never realized that this fits into my writing style perfectly. I like to write as if I am having a one-on-one conversation with my reader and writing it for one person made it possible. Now, when a person reads my story, it becomes a one-on-one conversation between us. So, by this, I was having a personal chat with my reader.
You need not write for the whole world; you need to write for one person.
The Fourth Step:
The fourth step was easy for me.
It was to convince that the primary focus of writing is to share your thoughts. Everything else, well, they are the by-product of it. Your focus should be on generating new ideas and then conveying them through your writing with quality. For me, “Quality is better than Quantity”.
So, the focus should be on doing quality work.
The Fifth Step:
This step involved a bit of research. I had to choose the platform. As we all know, there are multiple ways to start writing. It includes Medium, Hubpages, Ghost, Substack, Wick, Starting your website, etc.
Each of them has their pros and cons.
For me, it was easier to create my website but hard to manage. Medium and Substack were also good options, as it was easier to start blogging on those than to create a website. So, what did I do?
All of them!
I created my website and started blogging on Medium and Substack as well. I wanted to have a taste of both worlds. It suits me as well. Eventually, I found Substack and Medium more suitable. So, I continued with those.
Likewise, you can also experiment with multiple platforms and stick to whatever suits you.
Just opt for it and start.
Bonus Step:
This one was after the start.
Although the five steps mentioned above are the main steps that I took to start my journey, there’s one more step that was quite problematic for me once this journey begun.
I struggled to manage everything, from documenting the ideas to expanding and finalizing them.
These all took a lot of my time, so even though I had everything prepared by the end of the day, I lacked the motivation to publish it. Sometimes, I had prepared the final draft of the story but still held myself from publishing it. The final step of uploading the story on the publishing board and hitting the publish button was the hurdle that I wasn’t aware of before starting. I had no idea that I would struggle with it. But I did.
However, I got the solution for it eventually.
I kind of omitted this step. I started to put my stories in the drafts, ready to be published. It stayed there for some time. I kept on changing them to make them better, and when I felt that I was ready to publish them, I did it.
It helped me to prepare myself to publish my final draft.
I am not sure if anyone else is facing or has faced the same struggles as I have. Nor do I know if this story will be helpful to anyone. But this is how I conjured up the confidence to fulfill my long pending desire.
I will be happy if this story will be helpful to anyone. If not, then read it like any other story.
If yes, then;
The pleasure is all mine, and we will meet again in the next post.
Till then,
Shreesh, Signing off!
Originally published at https://theterran.substack.com.
