Write It Your Way. Whenever a post of mine does… | by Hannah Victoria | The Writing Cooperative

Whenever a post of mine does particularly well, I feel happy and then terrified. What if this is as far as I’ll come, what if I can never do better? The fear is something I downplay at

first, but it’s sneaky. It will give me a million excuses to stop writing and the longer I listen to it, the longer I stop writing for. First, it’s one day, because I’m busy at work and

taking one day off is normal and understandable. Then it’s two because I’m taking a weekend trip and couldn’t take my laptop. Before I know it, four days have passed because I felt exhausted

from travelling and needed a break. The excuses are always there and the longer I wait, the more convincing they become. The fear begins to seem more real too. What if, in the days that

have passed without me writing, I’ve lost all of the ideas I once had? What if I no longer know how to write? The last question sounds silly, but it actually goes through my mind a few times

a day when I haven’t written anything for a while. It makes me wonder whether everything was just a fluke. Maybe the people who commented on my work didn’t actually enjoy it or, even worse,

they did and now they’ll be disappointed because I’ve forgotten how to write. I don’t want to let anyone down, least of all myself. If I stop at a point where one of my posts has done okay,

I won’t have to deal with the idea of the next one being a failure in comparison. The problem with that logic is that it’s holding me back and I know it. The lost days don’t really do

anything other than make me suppress ideas and label the ones that do come as not original enough or too specific. For a while I thought the best solution was to write and publish every

single day. The only problem was that I sucked at it; anything I wrote for the sake of it sounded just that way. It sounded like me filling space and desperately trying to reach an

acceptable word count. I wasn’t saying much other than: I feel like I should write so here you go. That’s not how I want to write though. When I’m writing something I care about, it feels

like my fingers are acting of their own accord. Thoughts flow quickly and I don’t stop or guide them. While this may result in a messy first draft, it’s also real. It describes how I feel

and while…