Write What You Love

The expression "My eyes are bigger than my stomach" in my life sometimes applies to books. I buy books as often as some people buy coffee. To me, they hold in their bindings the hope and promise of escaping to another world, understanding the past, escalating my self-knowledge, and honouring the legacy of those that came and went before. 

We all have a story. Most of them are interesting given the right storyteller. Walking into an Indigo/Chapters totally stresses me out. All of those thoughts. Those stories. Those amazing insights that I will never have the chance to read. My bookcase is a little mini bookstore of books I haven't read. Organized into thematic sections representing the things that are important to me. Every month I pull out a random book and dive in. I always seem to gravitate toward the travel memoir section. This time it was a loosely-based-on-reality memoir entitled "In the Merde for Love."

It was the ultimate travel memoir that had me smiling on the subway and genuinely not being able to wait to crack the spine for the vivid descriptions of the french countryside and the life foibles and learnings of a stranger. A stranger I will likely never meet but now know almost intimately.

This book reminded me that I love reading about exactly what I'm writing about in my own writer-ly pursuits. This gives me the courage that there's someone out there that would love reading about my very own foibles and learnings. Even if it just ends up being my grandkids or the ladies in the nursing home. It's these little moments of motivation that keep me going.

Editing is Not my Jam

I'm kind of the queen of exaggeration, but it does feel like I've been editing my book for 200 million years. It's so overwhelming to think about how long an edit will take on a 500-page manuscript. So I end up procrastinating for literal years. The first draft only took two years of regular early mornings and coffee shop Sundays to write. But the editing is a whole other story. It brings me no joy and mainly highlights my insecurities.

Editing is this critical bridge between the spark of an idea put to paper, and the masterpiece that you know it could be if you edited it well. And I think this fear of not perfectly completing that link, has kept me a bit paralyzed. But I've come to realize that perfection is not only the enemy of the good but the enemy of the great. If we wait for the perfect, we could miss out on a really fantastic thing. Never mind that perfection often takes a lifetime and is sometimes never achieved, certainly not for a perfectionist.

So I keep going. Keep writing. Keep editing when I can find the motivation to do so. Balancing passion with paying the bills and finding love and moving the rest of my life forward, because I can't afford not to. I've gotta keep on keeping on.

Some of my quick tips to stay out of self doubt and keep it moving forward:

1. Don't (over) think..just do, and the rest will follow. 
2. Write/Create what you love - even if no one else likes it you'll have fun doing it.
3. Don't worry - it makes everything worse and it's procrastination's best friend.
4. Chunk out the time for things you hate doing and reward yourself after. 

Just do it! Still my favourite mantra...