‘I am a writer and I have something to say.’
This sentence appears over and over again in one of my journals. I was advised in a course, Dealing With Doubt, that I took as a member of The Literary Consultancy in 2021, to write this down once every day until I began to believe it. At the time, I was so sceptical. I wanted to write, but my draft was awful, stalled, and I had no confidence in my abilities to write anything. I wasn’t sure that I had anything to say and the ‘something’ bothered me. What was it that I had to say? I had no idea.
Still, I had paid for my membership and I decided to give it a chance and work through the course. Well, over time, it worked. Somehow, I began to believe that I might be a writer and that it is okay to say it. Out loud. I’m a writer. And I took part in Write Club Plus in 2022, a The Literary Consultancy add on, which also fuelled my confidence. I even read some of my work aloud towards the end of the year to my peers. I finished my novel draft, explored editing with little success – again it was a zero-confidence thing. My inner critic, my imposter syndrome bit hard, but this time, I knew that with some help and advice, the right sort of support, I could learn this part of the writing journey too (more on that in a future post).
Meanwhile, I part drafted other novel ideas, developed outlines, wrote some poems, a few short stories, and dithered about the industry and what comes next. How do I make the leap from writer to author? And I discovered that it isn’t so much of a leap as a series of steps. Let’s call them baby steps because small steps aren’t as scary as leaps into the unknown, are they?
And big
reveal, drum roll please: I haven’t crossed any great divide. I have no
agent. No publisher. No one asking for my manuscript desperate for it to see
the light of day. And what’s significant about this is that I’m actually okay
with this. For now. All in good time. I’m not there yet. But I am writing and I'm editing my first novel. That is success to me.
Remember those baby steps?
Since Dealing With Doubt, I have published two short works to date. The first is a poem, Dawn by Lindisfarne, which features in the Dylan Day anthology, Love The Words 2022. The second is a short story, The Night Watch, published in All Along The Edge in 2023. Baby steps, each one of these.
