Getting Ready to Get Ready

Writers must write. Everyday.

I started referring to myself as "a writer" back in the 90s. I liked the cache it carried and I felt worth of the title because my job was literally to write (I responded in writing to requests for proposal on behalf of a very large health care organization). But time revealed the stark difference between writing as a job title and writing because it's elemental to who I am as a human being. I wrote, but I wasn't a Writer.

That all changed when a therapist recommended I give The Artist's Way a shot. For the uninitiated, author Julia Cameron's practical handbook for creatives demands that its readers start each day by handwriting three full pages of stream-of-consciousness-style "morning pages." These words are not intended for sharing or publication or even rereading when one is finished. The objective is to clear one's head of all the minutia it wakes up with so the brain has the space and clarity to focus on creativity.

It was a struggle to begin. Some morning all I could muster was a single page before the distractions started flooding in. Other days I could hammer out three pages without stopping. But over the course of 12 weeks something fundamental changed in me. The whining and boo-hooing that dominated my morning pages early on gave way to self-coaching and better writing overall. I started to feel more comfortable and more satisfied in front of a blank Word doc. I approached my work with a sense of confidence where once there was only dread.

Writing everyday made me feel like a Writer, capital aitch.

The hardest part of writing is simply to start.

As my writing continued to evolve, I heard a little voice in my head telling me I should write a book — and I believed it. I had always dreamed of seeing my name on the cover of a book, and of driving to a bookstore and buying my own work off the shelf. But those dreams seemed so ridiculous to me, as if that kind of living was reserved other, better, smarter, more talented people. Who am I to write a book? But the idea wouldn't die, and I felt as though I was perpetually getting ready to get ready to write that book. I was paralyzed by inertia and fear that I would fail. My own brain kept me in neutral for years.

Then one day, for reasons I cannot understand, I sat down and wrote a sentence: "My first therapist's name was Neil Diamond." I sat and stared at it for a minute, then I added a comma and made the sentence longer, more descriptive. And it suddenly dawned on me that without my planning it or intending it, I had started. I was writing a book. When my conscious mind was elsewhere, I had become an aspiring author.

I wrote everyday for a year, sometimes a couple of sentences, sometimes a couple of pages. The writing was non-linear and some days I'd deleted what I'd written because it sounded amateurish and dumb. But I kept going, and in August of 2009 my little book about me was published by one of the big houses in New York.

I share this anecdote because I talk to so many writers who are stuck in the same situation I once was: getting ready to get ready to start. They feel they have a book in them, or a poem, or an essay. But the fear of failure (or the fear of success) flatly will not allow them to pursue what's inside them.

To these folks, and to you, I say this: start. Sit down right now and write one sentence. Then back away. Look at it. Breathe it in. Don't worry about the quality of your prose or the subject-verb agreement. Just look at it. You have started. You are on your way. Now keep going.