I gotta say that Shaunta Grimes really hits it home in this one (with humor too). I can certainly identify with part of what she’s discussing here.
A few words by Shaunta Grimes: “I didn’t make a conscious decision not to publish. It just happened. And then it kept happening for more than two years. As evidenced by the zero fiction that I published.
I was still writing. I’ve written three novels and a dozen short stories in that time. They’re nice and cozy on my hard drive, wrapped in a thick layer of my fear of publishing them.
A fiction writer’s brain is a crafty trickster. It’ll convince itself that writing a whole shit ton of blog posts and MFA packets is the same thing as writing. It’ll rationalize that finishing novels is the end game and totally blow off publishing like it’s no big thing.”
And . . .
“Your writer brain will do everything it can to protect you from the hard, hard work of creating a story and then putting your baby on a street corner and hoping everyone thinks she’s pretty.
Of course your brain is trying to protect you (and itself) from that. That, friends, is crazy town.
And then one day you look up and realize that you have three novels on your hard drive, and you haven’t even sent them to your critique partner. Because one day in 2014 you walked into Barnes and Nobel and realized that they didn’t pick up your second book.”
READ: “This is how to override your writer brain. Publish anyway.” @shauntagrimes https://medium.com/@shauntagrimes/this-is-how-to-override-your-writer-brain-publish-anyway-1e3548cbb4ba
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