You’re displeased by your lack of progress, impatiently flashing the cursor across the empty word document. The laptop screen is barely visible in the glaring sunlight of the garden, and every sentence you’ve typed on it, you’ve deleted just as quickly. There are days when six thousand words come and go easily from your cramped hands as if you were doing nothing more than tying your shoelaces, but there are also days like this. Days where your efforts to string sentences together feel like trying to force pieces of the wrong puzzle to fit, and the words get stuck on the tips of your fingers as they hover over your keyboard.
Once upon a time, the laptop was a notebook, and the cursor a pen. Half the words on the page were written so unintelligibly as your hands refused to keep up with your racing mind that you could barely read them yourself. The other half lazily scribbled over in an attempt to erase the words from history forever. If I could speak to the writer I once was, I’d need her to know a few things.
- It doesn’t need to be perfect. Just done.
When it comes to reaching goals, this saying has become my lifeline. A thousand words of nonsense is always more progress than zero words. Even if you wake up the next day and scrap the whole thing, an important part of the writing journey is building confidence. If you’re too afraid of failure to write anything at all, where does that leave you? Maybe it’s a cliche, but something is better than nothing.
- No finality in a first draft.
Following on from this, always remember that no one sees the first draft unless you show them. Stop treating your writing that no one will see with such ugly contempt. Allow it to be a complete mess if that’s what it takes to have something on the page. Stop trying to make the first draft look like the final draft.
- Save some action.
You’re not in a contract that says you have to use every single idea that you find nestling in the crevices of your mind. Stop trying to cram every idea you have into one story: it’s going to be your downfall. A complicated story does not equal a better story. You will have more opportunities to use your ideas.
- Be kind to yourself.
We all have a million and one criticisms about ourselves, and sometimes it’s true that you’re your own biggest enemy. You’re going to read back on your work and cringe, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re an awful writer. You have to give yourself a chance.
- Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Don’t expect to know every detail of the story all at once. You likely won’t have one big groundbreaking moment whilst the story has barely etched its way into existence yet. Don’t let this put you off. Keep building. Keep writing. I know you’ll get there.
—Elisha Greenwood
This blog post is in collaboration with the 2025 Beyond the Walls Anthology. The anthology is available to order from Valley Press here. The cohort behind the anthology are constantly producing high quality work surrounding the publication. You can find similar blog pieces in collaboration with the anthology here on the Where Ideas Grow blog. You can also listen to their podcast episodes on Spotify and find updates on the anthology on their social media platforms, all linked below.