Some Simple Encouragement and Advice for Writers, Artists, and other Creatives

You’re thinking about a story or a blog idea and boom, it hits you like a frying pan in the face in one of those old cartoons. It’s that perfect idea. It’s the one that takes everything that throbs inside of you and puts it into words that express it in a way you haven’t heard before. For a moment, you rocket up into the stratosphere, imagining the unique visitors and comments, the book sales, the TED talks, the friggin’ Nobel prize!

Then that other feeling hits you. It’s the one that makes you feel like someone’s just poured a pint of mercury into your veins. It’s a feeling of dread and depression. It says, “yeah, this is the most incrediawesomeable idea I have ever heard. It’s the one that’s going to make me. But then what?” What do you follow it up with. You stop hopping around in the shower like Gollum with his precious, and you stand there, water dripping off your cheeks, a cold numbness prickling at your private parts. The mercury meets up with that prickling and makes it way, slowly to your brain. All your dreams clam up under the urging voice saying, “Put it away. The thought is too good. You can’t follow it up. People will be disappointed with whatever you put out next. You’ll slowly watch your followers tick down from the hundreds of thousands to the fifty that you have now, which consists of TeamFollowBack members, BookSpammers, and your alcoholic uncle who writes dark, erotic crime novels with characters that are uncomfortably close in resemblance to the people in your family.”

We all know that voice. Anyone who is judged on their creativity knows that voice because we know we are not the source of our ideas. We are dependent on inspiration for our greatest ideas, and we cannot control it. So we worry when we stumble across something truly excellent that we might just be setting ourselves up for disappointment when we can’t sustain that level of mind-blowing brilliance.

Let me step in to encourage you here, my friend. I’m all for practical consideration and planning out your next steps before making big decisions, but worry has no place in that process. So the next time you hear that voice, step out of the shower, throw it in the toilet and flush it. Then towel off and go write. Don’t worry about following up your brilliant ideas with more brillianter ideas. Just put them out there and keep writing. It won’t all be great, but the more you write, the better and more consistent it will get.