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Trust Your Creative Process
Embrace your internal mess.
When I was in my infancy as a writer, the literary universe felt like an echo chamber filled with nonstop chatter. Much of that babble concerned waiting for the “right” time to begin publishing and sharing one’s work.
The exact duration of this “right” time frankly seemed vague.
Seasoned authors would advise up-and-comers to pause for an accepted duration between initial efforts at mosaicking words together and trying to find suitable homes for those works to make their public debut. And they would prescribe a more extended period before one should amass enough audacity to slingshot out poems or stories to compete for awards and funding, roll the dice on a retreat application, and do public readings.
This ambiguous delay varied for writers, likely based on their confidence as a creator, and indeed, no timeline between any two writers was remotely the same.
But this emphasis on biding your time loomed like a shadow. The stress over “when” to debut as a poet, essayist, or author. And how. And where.
I’ve always taken writing and art seriously, yet I have often not taken them seriously at all. In college, I took a hiatus from writing so creativity would not sidetrack my left-brained aspirations of earning degrees in engineering and business. I…