You Can’t Skip Straight to the Exciting Part
Take the time to plant the seeds of your stories
Wake Up and Write is a regular advice column from Moms Don’t Have Time to Write. Today, we have Dolly Alderton — columnist, former co-host of “The High Low” podcast, and the author of The Sunday Times best-selling memoir Everything I Know About Love— who shared writing advice on the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, hosted by Zibby Owens.
“Here’s the main advice I have. I did an Instagram post about this the other day.”
“It was a picture of a notebook that I bought when I went to New York when I was like twenty-four. I had no money and had to really plan meticulously what I was going to do today so I wouldn’t just completely run out of cash. I gave myself five dollars to buy one thing for myself while I was in New York to remember the trip.
I was in Greenwich Village in a stationary shop and found this beautiful little notebook exercise book that I bought. Then I went and sat in a café and I sipped coffee incredibly slowly all afternoon so I could stay at the table. I wrote loads and loads of ideas for a nonfiction book about my twenties and everything I was experiencing. It filled the whole book, just all thoughts.
When I came to sit down and write my book after I got a book deal four years later, I used lots of little bits of it. Then just before New Year’s, The Sunday Times did a list that was about the ten best-selling nonfiction books of the last year. My book was number nine.
It felt so trippy to me that that weekend I’d found that exercise book with my mad scribbles in and literally coffee splattered from that café. It just reminded me that anything life-changing — any creative projects that will be life-changing — will take you to new places, will somehow define who you are, and will be a really important stamp that you leave on the world.
Whatever that creative project is, it will always begin in an exercise book. It will always begin on a tiny, tiny page, whether it’s a Post-it or an iPhone note or a dollar exercise book. That’s the genesis. That’s the source of everything.
You can’t skip that bit and get straight to the exciting part. However small your piece of paper that you’re currently scribbling on, that is the seed that you’re planting in the ground now for the most glorious thing that can grow.”
Listen to the episode:
Buy the book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0241982103/?ref=exp_momsdonthavetimetoreadbooks_dp_vv_d
