“I always wanted to write a book, but…”

Writing is weird. It’s the only hobby you can have where you make absolutely no money from it but gain instant respect from people when they find out that you do it.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve published zero short stories or a hundred. It doesn’t matter if you’ve spent twenty years “working on a novel” or have published a dozen. It’s always the same thing: “Oh cool, you’re a writer.”

But that’s not actually want I wanted to talk about. It’s the Part 2 of that response I wanted to bring up. You know, the one where they follow up with:

“I always wanted to write a book, but…”

It doesn’t really matter what that “…” is, but it’s always there. I know for a long chunk of my life I fell into that category. My excuses for not writing fiction varied, but I think what held me back the most was just my own lack of confidence in my own work. I always felt I was a good enough writer to dabble with stuff online, but not write “for real”. I wrote a weekly column for a now-defunct pro-wrestling site for a couple of years in the early 2000’s and also ran a libertarian commentary blog for a while.

But fiction? It just seemed to hard. And even if I could do it well, I had no idea what to do with it. I didn’t want to devote precious free time to writing if it wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

The way I looked at it, for better or worse was “Why write, if you can’t publish?”

Well, due mostly to the information age, I found out that it’s not only possible to “do something” with fiction, but it’s actually not too difficult to get published, and even make a buck or two doing so. So finally in 2010, I hit the computer and wrote my first short story (not counting anything I did for a college creative writing class.)

I had no clue.

Actually, I shouldn’t say that; I just hadn’t found a style I was comfortable with. I also had no idea what to write about, so followed the old axiom: “write what you know.”

And, really, what do I know more about than alien abductions?

So that led to a little slice-of-life short story I called “Dreamer” tracing two disgruntled aliens as they prepared to abduct an unsuspecting human. (This story was eventually published at TheWiFiles under the title “Breeding Ground.” Give it a look.)

It was fun. It was also great to get over that fear that I wasn’t “good enough” or had no idea what to do with any fiction I managed to write and just finally give it a try.

So my whole point here is for you to do the same thing. If you’ve always wanted to write, stop holding yourself back and just do it.

I promise you won’t regret it. The only thing you’ll regret is putting it off.