Just Start Writing Your Novel

Lindsay Shalla
9 min readJul 30, 2018

Dealing with the jitters and insecurities that authors face when writing that first sentence.

We all think at some point or another that we are not good writers.

It could stem from the anxiety of being a failure or it could be because someone actually told you that you aren’t as good as you thought you were. Either way, it has happened to even the best of us.

When these situations do occur, a horrible thing results. You decide to stop dead in your writing tracks and doubt yourself until you never want to write again. And, worst of all, it can happen before you have even started writing a novel.

Despite most beliefs, doubt is not the only thing that can cause you to put your book ideas on hold. In fact, there is a bigger player intercepting creative ideas before they can develop into a story, and that is writing anxiety.

This type of anxiety is not the same as all the others. Instead of feeling scared of your writing, you wind up feeling too excited about it. Perhaps a better name for this would be Writing Jitters. If you have Writing Jitters, chances are you’re stuck clutching your novel plans and don’t know where or how to start writing your actual novel.

And don’t get me wrong, novel planning is a great, great thing. However, only having the plans and not writing…

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Lindsay Shalla

Aspiring author and editor of all things. Curiosity is the spark that ignites creation.