Don’t Self-Cancel

Being a writer is exhausting. Sure, to the outsider it looks like nothing but limousines and tuxedos¹, but in reality being a professional writer — or even a for-the-love-writer — means being an idea machine. As in, you have to have an endless supply of evergreen ideas to keep those sweet checks coming in.

This is true in fiction and freelance. The craft stuff, the style and the grammar and the tricks and the techniques are all important, but they’re meaningless unless you have an idea to work on. Without an idea to spin into characters and plot or a thesis and supporting material, you’ve got nothing.

The worst part is how easy it is to gaslight yourself about potential ideas.

You Know: For Kids

Every creative person experiences the sort of self-doubt that can potentially light your hair on fire, and it’s never more powerful than when you have what initially seems like a really great idea for a story or article. It’s so easy to convince yourself, slowly at first and with increasing speed, that you can’t pull it off, or it’s too crazy, or it’s actually been done, or no one will get it.

And these things might be true, which is the hell of it all. But you should work on that idea anyway. Self-cancelling yourself just leads to doing nothing. It leads to creating nothing. Sure, your nutty idea might flop. Maybe you can’t pull it off. You’ll wind up with a mess of terrible, half-assed words.

Boo fucking hoo. Welcome to the world of writing! It’s terrible here.

At least you’ll have works to disparage and bury, to burn ritualistically in your basement while summoning dark forces to your aid. If you self-cancel and convince yourself your ideas are shit, you won’t even have that. So write those ideas. Work on them. Revise them, improve them, and at least then when you’re burning the hard drive and chanting Baphomet’s secret name you’ll have a good reason.

1. TRUTH: It’s Uber Pools and grocery bags you have ingeniously stitched together into trousers.