Writing for you is ruining my writing

Something of a hero’s journey

Writing is something I’ve always done. Don’t we all? Everyone spends massive chunks of day writing emails, text messages, shopping lists, to-do lists, assignments, posts, tweets, newsletters, you name it. Hang around Substack too long and you get the impression that everyone in the whole world is a writer and has several books and thousands of subscribers and knows exactly how to succeed. I’m happy for them all, really I am. And I’m comfortable with my progress. Comfortable with my rhythm. Comfortable with my level of success. 

I wrote my first novel when I was 19. It was in the early days of the internet and I imagined what would happen if someone pretended to be God and people believed him. I was intrigued by the premise and decided to find out. I wrote it with a pen and a notebook. I just sat down day after day and wrote. The middle got hard. Then it got easier again and then it was done. I typed it up and tried to edit it. Realised it would never be amazing and of course then people did start setting up God profiles on social media and nothing of the sort happened so the idea got old and lost its shine. I shelved it.

The second one happened when I was around 29 I think. Thought about what would happen if people went to another planet and started behaving like aliens do here. Giving anal probes to the locals, making crop circles, and building pyramids, for example. I was intrigued and decided to find out. I had a laptop by then, so I wrote it in a Word document. Week after week I ploughed through multiple storylines set on a timeline hundreds of thousands of years long. The middle got hard, then it got easier and then it was done. I tried to edit it and sent it tentatively to a couple of publishers. A hybrid publisher said they’d publish and promote it for $1000. Reasonable, but I didn’t believe it was any good because almost everyone I sent it to didn’t finish it. I put it in the bottom drawer of my mind.

My third novel came about during Covid lockdowns, so I must have been around 40. I couldn’t stop thinking about the sci-fi story and I didn’t know what to do. Maybe I just needed more practice writing fiction. I decided to fictionalize a story from my life - my first gap year, which was spent in Paris. I figured it would work because people said things like “you left Australia a girl and you came back a woman”, so I knew it was a period of growth in my life. Also, there were some crazy things I got up to that I was keen to describe in some detail. Again, the middle was the hardest part, but I got through it to a satisfying end. When it came to editing, I got help. I paid $1000 to a professional, who tore it to pieces. I rebuilt it. I did an online coaching session. I did two courses on editing and pitching a novel. I wrote about Roman a Clef as a style¹ and gave a talk to a local writers’ society. Beta readers were mostly complimentary, but not blown away. I wrote synopses and cover letters and bios and sent the first 10 pages to dozens of agents and publishers, most of whom never replied, and those that did sent form rejections. I figured it was still not good enough and moved on.

I felt like I’d learned enough to have another crack at the sci fi book. I started rewriting it from scratch. I put a sex scene in the opening, in the hope it would be more engaging. It certainly was to me. I hired a coach who wrote up a writing plan and I stuck to it, even when the middle got hard. I kept almost nothing of the first draft, other than the bare outline of the story. Almost all of the text was new, and many of the scenes and storylines. My coach read alongside me and said nice, encouraging things all the way through. I became obsessed and dreamed about it. I chatted to my friend who is an expert in story structure, and he forced me to pull out the underlying theme. I had visions and epiphanies of what it was really all about. I finished it and edited carefully, pulling it apart and putting it back together. I sent it to a handful of readers. Most of them took a while to finish it. Some never finished. Those that did had issues with it. I sent it to one agent and she hated it.

Getting my story straight - structural edit on Journey to Kyron, take 2

Desperate, I decided to take the plunge on publishing myself. Without consistent practice and publishing and instant feedback to help with iteration and improving, I figured I would never be any good. I started a Substack. I gave it the tagline “taking the ideas of the techno-optimists and turning them into stories”, but really, it was just a mishmash of whatever I was thinking about/inspired by/could actually turn into something coherent that week.

Growth was slow, but existent. Email opens hovered around 50%. Likes and comments were low but sometimes incredibly positive. Enough to give me hope and push me forwards. When the number of subscribers passed the number of Substacks I subscribed to, I decided to start publishing chapters. That was a few weeks ago. I’m rewriting the book for the third time, trying to take into account everything the beta readers have said and everything I’ve learned, but it’s more of a struggle than I want. I don’t want it to be a big deal. I just want to enjoy writing one or two thousand words each week and marginally improving on this story that means so much to me. 

But I’m getting in my own way I guess. Percent opens have gone down again, which makes sense because if you haven’t gotten into it, you might not want to jump in partway, or you might want to binge it a bit down the track. But I’m finding this massive resistance to writing it. It’s not flowing, and I’m not even in the tricky middle yet. It’s just the beginning. I’m probably oversensitive to what you might be thinking. I know in my head it doesn’t matter. You can’t please everybody, and consistency is key when it comes to online writing. I just can’t get past the thought that I’m doing it wrong. And so, over the past few weeks, I’ve retreated to my old habits. Instead of writing for my Substack, I’ve been filling my journal and private files. Letting my words flow without the intention of sharing. Where I can be comfortable and free.

So if this is my hero’s journey, where I get to grow and learn and push through the hard times, I’m just at the beginning. I’ve heard the call and I’m resisting. I’ve found a master to sit at the feet of: I’ve begun the Fearless Writer Challenge² with

Tim Denning

. I’m posting on Twitter every day despite enormous resistance from within and very little engagement without, and now I’m writing a newsletter just as he suggests - don’t overthink it. Write it, read it out loud once, then publish and move on. 

So here I am - a flawed and imperfect writer, but a writer nonetheless. Because whether I do it well or not, I can confidently say that yes, I write. Thank you if you made it this far - this was a selfish post and I wish there was more in it for you. If you want to support me, go ahead and give the heart a click, or leave me a message so I know you’re out there. Please.

Much love (and insecurity),

Shoni

🙏

1. Using a pen name I’ve since abandoned.

2. For those who’ve been with me from the beginning, this is the very challenge I reached out to you about a few months ago. The reason I’ve gone ahead and jumped into it now is because I continued reading Tim’s content in the interim and finally became convinced that he genuinely wants to do good in the world with his gifts.