Start Writing

“The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.” — Stephen King

Getting started feels a lot like rolling out of bed to go on a run.

It’s never easy but it does get easier.

A million voices run through your head, “you have nothing important to stay, 5 more minutes, what will people think, you should think more about what you want to write before you write it”.

Even when you put on your shoes and take your first steps, the voices don’t stop. “Go back to bed, it’s too cold outside, you have other stuff to do.”

Keep those voices out of your head.

“write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out.”

If you buy a pair of shoes at specialized boutique store for running, you will be overwhelmed with what these experts have to say. You need these shoes, with a certain type of insole, and special socks so you don’t get blisters.

It’s all baloney.

All you need to run are your two legs.

Shut out the voices that keep you overthinking what you need to do. You will be overwhelmed with all the rules and requirements. Just write.

Spend your early morning moments writing anything and everything.

Do not stop. Do not think.

Write.

“The aim [of constant writing] is to burn through to first thoughts, to the place where energy is unobstructed by social politeness or the internal censor, to the place where you are writing what your mind actually sees and feels, not what it thinks it should see or feel.” — Natalie Goldberg

A runner’s high is this glorious moment when time fades away. Your mind is clear and you feel like you can run for hours. Nothing exists but your hot breath, the weight of your arms swinging back and forth, the sweat dripping down your forehead and the sound of your feet hitting the pavement.

A writing high is similar. Without the sweating and the heavy breathing, although, there have been a few times…

You never get a ‘writers high’ unless you overcome the initial inertia of getting out of bed and start writing. The voices that tell you to stay in bed, keep that post in draft, juuuuust edit it one more time, will prevent you from ever getting to that point.

Natalie Goldberg says, keep writing until you hit a realm called ‘first thoughts’.

Once you do, you get to a place where your thoughts flow freely and you fully enter into your body. You feel present and alive.

Keep Writing

“I believe stories are found things, like fossils in the ground… Stories are relics, part of an undiscovered pre-existing world. The writer’s job is to use the tools in his or her toolbox to get as much of each one out of the ground intact as possible.” — Stephen King

When you keep writing and burn through to ‘first thoughts’, you realize you don’t know what your writing about until you write it.

Stephen King compares this to digging. Writing is about allowing our first thoughts to float around and as soon as we capture them down on paper (or a blank Medium page), we unearth a fossil that used to exist in our brain.

This is good. It means we discovered something new.

Anne Lamott feels the same way.

Then I do the menial work of getting it down on paper, because I’m the designated typist, and I’m also the person whose job it is to hold the lantern while the kid does the digging. What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time — but she knows gold when she sees it. — Anne Lamott

What do both these successful writers have in common?

They dig.

They write without knowing what to write about. They are able to do so because they consistently write, shut the door, exist in ‘first thoughts’, and are on a writers high.

They keep digging. They keep writing.

Eventually, they strike gold.

“You have to give yourself the space to write a lot without a destination.” — Natalie Goldberg

Natalie Goldberg doesn’t use any digging analogies in her book, but she knows what it’s like to write without knowing what to write about.

You often find what you need to write as you write.

Start writing. Keep writing.

Share What You See

“Some of us tend to think that what we do and say and decide to write are cosmically important things. But they are not.” — Anne Lamott

We tend to hold onto our writing because we have such high expectations for it. We believe we have a message that the world needs to hear. We want to make it perfect and tidy because we only have one shot of telling it.

This is not true.

What we have to say has been said before.

What we say is not as important as how we say it. And the more times we say it, the better we get at saying it.

Say what you have to say. Publish it. Send it to a friend. Then say it again, and again, and again. Nicolas Cole has become a writing sensation and he reuses the same stories over and over and over again. Each time, he adds a new twist.

“We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details.”- Natalie Goldberg

When we re-watch a movie or re-read a book, we discover new details. Those details make the story feel fresh.

We must do this in our writing. We must say the same things, tell the same stories, reuse quotes people have read, and tell them our own way.

Nothing is special about this. It has all been said before. But it may not have been said the way want to say it.

It’s looking cooking apple pie. You use the same recipe. It doesn’t make the apple pie any less delicious. But one day you decide to do something different.

It’s in the little details you add, a new type of apple, an extra slab of butter, a thicker crust, that make the apple pie feel new and flavorful.

“If we see their lives and festivals as fantastic and our lives as ordinary, we come to writing with a sense of poverty. We must remember that everything is ordinary and extraordinary. It is our minds that are either open or close. Details are not good or bad. They are details.” — Natalie Goldberg

Dushka Zapata is a prolific writer on Quora with 160,000+ followers. She has earned a reputation for taking ordinary moments and making them extraordinary. Her attention to detail in everyday life is what makes her writing relatable for thousands of readers.

We must not think other writers who have incredible stories have anything more important than us to say.

A story is told in the details. Share the details you see.

Start writing. Keep writing. Share what you see.

Tell the Truth

“Good writing is about telling the truth.” — Anne Lamott

Ask any writer what the secret to great writing is, they will say vulnerability. Well, it may not be the secret but it is a secret. Vulnerability casts a light on a truth so many of us are trying to hide. Readers connect with writers who share their deepest darkest secrets, because inside, we all have them too.

Writing about having trouble getting out of bed to write because we are worried about what other people will think is hard to write about.

“It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things.” — Natalie Goldberg

Are you an entrepreneur writer? Are you a writer that writes about writing? Are you a content marketer? Are you a travel blogger?

Write about the things that are hard to write about.

Everyone else is not writing about it too.

You can be the first one.

“…in the end, its about enriching the lives of others who will read your work, and enriching your own life as well.” — Stephen King

In telling the truth, you connect with your reader. You connect with yourself. You draw in the flaws and insecurities and weaknesses you normally try so hard to push away. You embrace them. For the moment, you feel whole. You love yourself for who you are and what you are. You forgive yourself for not being a perfect human being. In doing so, you allow others to do the same.

Writing is more than writing words on a page. Writing is more than website copy to sell products.

Writing is about sharing your deepest truest thoughts and connecting with your reader.

Start writing. Keep writing. Share what you see. Tell the truth.

Do it Every Day

Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there shining. — Anne Lamott

Write. Let your light shine.

Don’t look for an audience. Don’t worry about what people might think.

Take a good look at your lighthouse. Inspect the grime. See what needs to be fixed. Make sure the electricity is working. Clean it best you can.

But once it gets dark, turn you light on.

Do it every night, at the same time. Don’t forget.

It’s important you turn on your light,

Becuase you just might save a life.

Start writing. Keep writing. Share what you see. Tell the truth. Do it every day.

All quotes come from:

1. Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
2. On Writing by Stephen King.
3. Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

Dan Ahn is an aspiring writer. He quit his job last year to backpack South America for 6 months. Now, he’s biking across the US and hoping to raise $50,000 for charity.

Follow his journey at ReadAhn or on Instagram @dantahn.

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Writing Advice from 3 Famous Authors was originally published in The Writing Cooperative on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

If you’re anything like me before I left for my first backpacking trip, you are probably enticed by travel pictures of pristine white houses on the cliffs of Greece or photos of small asian men from Thailand with straw hats rowing a longboat through exotic landscapes.

You know you’ve been following too many travel blogs when Remote Year won’t stop sending you Facebook ads.

Maybe you’ve even seen these pictures of the Rainbow Mountains in Peru.

It looks unreal doesn’t it.

Because it is.

This is what they really look like.

Imagine my puzzled face covered in sweat from having climbed 2 hours to an elevation of 17,000 ft. where there is barely enough oxygen to fill a raisin, let alone my 2 lungs, which were in desperate need of air.

Instagram promised me rainbow mountains, not a pile of dirt that looked like a washed out pair of jeans.

Don’t be fooled like I was. It’s a photo editing trick called saturation. You can tell when a photo is overly-edited when the sky is so blue it looks like it was painted by Bob Ross.

Oh, and these pictures make it seem like you have the entire mountains to yourself right?

Wrong.

The lower half of my body is cropped for a reason.

Try taking a decent picture while mobs of anxious tourists stare at you like a pack of drooling dogs at the dinner table, waiting for you finish so they can attempt to fool their Instagram followers into thinking the entire experience is better than a Black Friday rush at BestBuy.

It’s not. At least you get a TV on Black Friday.

When you look at travel pictures, all you see are the good moments and none of the bad.

You don’t hear the drunk Germans at 3AM shamelessly humping on the bunkbed above you when you have an early bus the next morning.

Nor do you experience the relentless onslaught of dark, existential questions about your purpose in life that flood every waking thought after you decided to quit your job and leave it devoid of any meaning, instead choosing to pander around South America on rickety buses with vomiting children.

How about the frustration of trying to communicate with the bus driver in a language you don’t know? It’s kind of like Facetiming with poor WiFi connection, except on top of that your iPhone decided to change the audio from English to angry Spanish.

Don’t forget the clingers who invite themselves into the seat next to you on a 12 hour bus journey talking about horoscopes and spirits and then follow you around for a week like a stray dog. I’ve had actual stray dogs follow me around and they are better company.

Then, there are those life threatening moments when you regret ever having left the safety and comfort of your home in the first place.

Like this moment in Ecuador when I encountered my first cockroach. I hadn’t felt that much fear since I was sent to the principals office for threatening to spear my 4th grade classmate in the anus with a recorder.

If your idea of travel is based off a few filtered Instagram photos, then reconsider. Instagram is not a place that rewards reality. It is a place people turn to for inspiration from their mundane lives. Often times, it might mean stretching the truth or capturing only the inspirational moments.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Rainbow Mountain trek and traveling has been a life changing experience for me, so, when I say reconsider, I mean traveling is much more than the highlights.

You stand on that mountain for maybe an hour while the journey to get there takes much longer. Traveling is more about the experience of the journey than it is about reaching the final destination. It helps to understand that so you travel with the right expectations and for the right reasons.

Imagine more people painted a pretty picture of the ordinary. One picture you don’t see in the photographs of the Rainbow Mountains in Peru, are the sheer number of horses and Peruvian mountain men guiding tourists up the trail.

Why not post more about this? After all, there are few times in life, if any, where you can marvel at the sight of short Peruvians in home-knit llama clothing and tattered sandals effortlessly outpace you. That is something to gram about. If all you care about is reaching your destination, you miss out on the experiences in front of you.

Stop Fantasizing about Travel Pictures was originally published in The Post-Grad Survival Guide on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.