Maybe blame my sleep addled procrastinating brain for this one, but this week we’re doing a little bit of a rant. Writing is rarely sunshine and rainbows for most of us, and let’s talk about that.

We are surrounded by authors that seem to magically spawn books with a sneeze. Brandon Sanderson, who I hypothesize is part type-writer, is a great example of this. Then there are authors with decades long careers, like Stephen King, who has been publishing books before my parents were born. Christopher Paolini published a novel as a teenager. There are authors with great standalone books, epic sagas over a dozen books long, and even ‘simple’ things like poems that reside in your brain forever.

All I have to my name is a pair of published poems and a blog.

Okay, I’m being a little dramatic. This time last year I didn’t have either of those and barely a bachelor’s degree. Good things take time, there’s more in store for me, but that doesn’t make the ‘now’ any less frustrating.

I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately myself. Summer is always a hard time for me, as someone who has been a student and now in the education field, summers mean less structure and a lot of interruptions. My ADHD hates both of these things, and my productivity turns to a 0. To be fair, this summer I’ve had a funeral in my close family, a move into a new apartment, a reunion, several trips, and a summer camp job. But that means that my time for writing has been lacking, and that can kill self-esteem almost more than anything else. Needless to say, I can’t wait for school to start at the end of this month here in the PNW, meaning I can get back to writing during slow parts of my job as a substitute.

Slumps and writer’s block are only a few of the issues. Getting your name out there as a writer is damn hard. Ava and myself are very familiar with the dreaded rejection letters that come from trying to share your work. To get published, you have to do submissions and reach out places. And most of the time, you get a simple ‘no’ back in response. This is only natural, and no one’s fault, and we miss 100% of the shots we don’t take and all that, but rejection suuuuuuuucks. It can crush motivation or ruin thoughts on a project in seconds. Ouch.

It’s easy to feel inferior any time creativity and hard work is involved. I wrote just a bit ago about my own struggles with feeling less talented than Ava. I’ve struggled with feeling insufficient when compared to classmates or other peers. And don’t get me started on how insufficient I am compared to some of the publishing titan I look up to. How do you try to make yourself stronger, in a world that seems to only want to make you small?

Another difficulty comes from the sheer amount of projects and ideas bouncing around in there. I’ve never finished a full project before, though I do have enough poems to make a small collection, should I find a place for it. But as far as writing goes, I struggle to work on one thing long enough to make substantial progress, and often times when I go back to an old project, I wind up scrapping a lot of it. I have, within the last year, made great strides on Fae Marked, so when I get back into the swing of things that will likely return as my top priority. But between narrowing down and finalizing my chapbook, having ideas for short stories, and lots of different potential places to submit, there’s a lot I could be working on, and no right or wrong answers.

It’s cheesy as hell, but the best advice I have is to just keep going forward. For every step back, try to take two forward. For every rejection, do two more submissions. Remember that your skills now mean nothing compared to what they can be a month, or even a year from now. When I was a tutor, and students would tell me they struggled to write anything at all, I’d tell them to just throw stuff on the page and see what stuck. Even if you only wind up keeping a sentence, that’s still one more sentence than what you started with. Progress is progress, no matter how small.

For me right now, this just means my weekly blog posts. It’s better than nothing, it keeps me writing and thinking, and holds me accountable. In a few weeks, I’ll have more time in front of a laptop that doesn’t have Fields of Mistria installed on it and the boredom of subbing classes to get me back into writing. And of course, I have friends like Ava and other old classmates that keeps me wanting to do more and get more done. Ava just scored her first publication, and I can’t let her get a second one before I do!

So friends, keep going. Baby steps. Be comforted knowing that we all struggle at the beginning stages of breaking into a field. And remember to look back on where you’ve come from, and be proud of the progress you’ve made so far. The best is yet to come, and I’m excited to bring some good stuff to you all very soon.

---

This content was written and created by a human, without the use of any artificial intelligence tools. The authors do not authorize this article’s usage in training AI tools. We proudly support the original works of creators and individuals over technology that steals and manipulates original content without consent of creators.