WAKE UP AND WRITE
You Won’t Succeed As a Writer If You Don’t Write
Feed the fire in you that says: “you’re a writer.”
Wake Up and Write is a regular advice column from Moms Don’t Have Time to Write. Today, we have Cheryl Strayed — author of Torch, Tiny Beautiful Things, Brave Enough, and the number-one New York Times best-selling memoir, Wild — who shared writing advice on the podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books, hosted by Zibby Owens.
“Learn how to manage the negative voices in your head.”
“Most writers I know struggle with that sense of doubt or doom. Some variation of… ‘I tried and I failed. I can’t do this.’ It’s that voice in your head that keeps you from writing.
You have to come up with a way to work with that. It’s unlikely that one day you’re going to wake up and think, ‘I’m a great writer and everything I say is brilliant, so let me just type away.’ That’s probably not going to happen. I don’t know one person who writes that way.
You need to learn how to manage those voices and decide that you’re going to continue the work, even if it’s hard and even if it feels impossible or scary. You also have to find a way to glide past the external voices that say writing isn’t a very good career plan, or hardly any writers make a living from writing, or go get a real job.
What I would say to anyone who really wants to be a writer is that writing is a real job. It’s the realest work I’ve ever done.
Of course, it’s fraught with uncertainty. There are no guarantees to any kind of artist in this world that you’ll ever have that external success. But what we do know, is that you won’t succeed as a writer if you don’t write.
Decide to keep faith with that. Decide to keep faith with the daily practice of doing it. And by the daily practice of doing it, I don’t mean you have to write every day. I mean whatever little fire that you have burning in you that tells you you’re a writer, feed that fire. Do that work.
Whether you write one time a month for a day or write every day, come up with some system where you get the work done in spite of all of the forces against you that live both in your head and out in the world.”
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