Day #325: Doomed to Fail? Write It Anyway

One of my big mistakes as a young writer was conservatism. I held back a lot. I would have a book idea, but if I didn't think it was marketable, I would not write it. I was worried that I would write 100,000 words that would end up hidden in a drawer. When I wrote short stories and essays for my college classes, I kept the metaphors to a minimum. I didn't bother with eloquence. I got straight to the point, as I do with most of these blog posts. And I used lame verbs like "GOT" (See previous sentence.)

I must have believed that my creative energies were finite. That if I wrote brilliantly in an essay, I would run out of brilliance when it came time to write a novel.

Because of this flawed strategy, my writing style became sparse, more like Hemingway than Charles Dickens. More William Carlos Williams rather than William Shakespeare. My words are economic, which is good, but they are rarely poetry.

If I went back to relive those college years, I would have put passion into every paragraph. Yes, I would have written many more failures than I already have... But I would have taught myself so many more lessons.