The wonderful thing about life is the variety of experiences that we get to show up to each day.  And in the showing up, we make choices that will determine if our lives are happy or sad, vibrant or dull, comfortable or uncomfortable.

While none of us wants to be uncomfortable in life, that’s where the juice lies.  It’s the place where we push ourselves a little harder, step beyond the known into the unknown, and shake ourselves free from the shackles that bind us to outdated behavior and limited thinking.

That’s the fearless place.

Eleanor Roosevelt is one of my heroines in life.  She was unafraid to challenge the people who stood in her way, and she worked hard on behalf of many under-represented people, including women.  She said you must do one thing each day that scares you.

For me, showing up the page to write something can be daunting.  Can I express my thoughts so that people want to read them?  Are they relevant, hackneyed, clichéd, boring, or uninspired writing?  Am I taking enough risks?  Am I being fearless when I write, even in airports?

Many people tell me they want to write a book but they haven’t made the time to put pen to paper.  How they expect to write that book is anyone’s guess, but I suspect that what holds them back is the idea that they may not be able to tell their story well.  They feel daunted by the idea of a 200 or 300 page manuscript.  They miss the plot.

Anne Lamott, in her book ‘Bird by Bird’ was given sage advice by her father.  I can’t remember the exact story she told because I don’t have the book available to me, but when asked how he captured something, she was told ‘bird by bird’.

Writing a book is word by word.  Sentence by sentence until we get a stream of thought worked out in our heads that starts to make sense. But mostly, it’s a journey of discovery.

We write drivel most of the time, but occasionally we are inspired and something wonderful comes out of it.  It took me 12 years to write my first book When The Crow Sings because it kept changing on me.  It was a memoir, then it was an autobiography, then it was a novel.  In the end I called it a semi-autobiographical novel.  It made the most sense because it was a mixture of fiction and fact.   My readers tell me it’s wonderful, visceral and real.

It was a slow cooking process.

So if you’re thinking of writing something, and you’ve procrastinated because of fear of failure, rejection or humiliation, keep in mind that all great writers started in the same place.  Ernest Hemingway had an intense fear of writing rubbish, but he overcame it by saying “write so much that the rubbish will fall into the cracks.” He also said, “there’s nothing to do but sit down at a typewriter and bleed….”, which he did when he committed suicide!

Here are the obvious facts:

1. Write more than you want to, and less than you think will be necessary to tell a good story.
2. Accept that you will write a lot of rubbish, and that great writing is in the rewriting.  Editing is a skill best practiced on bad material. Like a diamond it is being polished.  Be ruthless.
3. Rewrite several times until you’re satisfied, then let it go.  You will never be finished.
4. Let others judge, but don’t believe all the reviews you read, unless they are good ones.

Accept that you wont’ get it write all the time.  Accept that you are not a genius waiting to be born.  Accept that failure is the only real way to get to the knowledge that lives inside of you, and is waiting to get out.  Accept that writing, like life, is a process.  A journey that has no clear vision of the end of the road because there are more twists and turns in the road than you could possibly imagine.

Being a writer takes courage.  It is a bearing of the soul, a glimpse into a private world. An exposure of your internal world and the world of the people you choose to write about.  It’s taking the chance that you may have nothing to say, or that no one will read it.

But if you are in love with writing, it won’t matter if it gets read or not.  It’s the process you love more than anything. Seeing the words on paper, knowing you have taken the time to observe the world you live in from an up close and personal vantage point.  That’s the gift you give yourself, and who knows, it may well be the gift you give others.

Enjoy the process.

Click here to hear an excerpt of When The Crow Sings or take The Fearless Factor quiz and find out how fearless you really are.