A few years ago I began writing my book. I thought it would be a stupid idea and felt nobody would read it. As a kid I had plenty of journals, I would write to God asking him to help people in my life, I would explain my thoughts and feelings to God, and at the end, I would date and sign it. I opened my journal and read my whole past and it made me feel good and showed me how God has helped me and others around me but for some reason, I began feeling self-doubt about my writing which made me procrastinate writing my book. Then every time I went on social media I would see videos on how to write a book, I would scroll past the videos hoping to forget the thought of writing. I prayed about the situation and asked God to guide me in the direction he wanted me to go. As months passed the thoughts of writing became more heavy on my mind. I kept ignoring it until one day I decided to open my old journals again, I started to see why I needed to write my book. Things became more clear but the doubts were still lingering in my head. Why would anyone care for this? But something in me kept making me want to write when I started writing and couldn’t stop. As I was writing I felt peace, joy, and relief in my heart, my thoughts became calm. This is when I knew I had to be writing. I wrote for hours. I didn't want to go outside, I didn’t want to talk on the phone, I didn’t want to be on social media, I didn't want to watch TV. I just wanted to write. As time passed I visited libraries and in-person writing groups to help improve my writing skills. While attending libraries and groups I learned so much from others I was afraid to tell people my struggles of not knowing what it takes to write a book and I found others just like me which made me feel comfortable enough to share this article with you. Attending these groups and libraries definitely made me feel intimidated by others. I felt like why the heck am I here with all these amazing writers? I began thinking I could never amount to their success and my book would be trash compared to theirs. This made me slow down on writing and learn more. I was determined to understand and become a better writer. I just needed some practice and wisdom. I was scared to put myself out there due to the fear of judgment on not knowing how to do something and I realized no humans know how to do everything and I didn’t mind learning. Everything I learned I applied to my book. Sometimes I can be a perfectionist and that got in the way of me writing my book because I was too worried about details being perfect. For example, I would write two characters and wait three weeks to delete them because I messed up on a few things that didn’t matter like editing, etc. I learned to overcome being a perfectionist by telling myself I am a human full of errors. This helps me every time.
My Journal 2011
Now this social media thing is crazy. Here’s why I say this I haven’t been on social media in seven years and when I started my book people in the group would ask me what my Instagram or Tik-Tok and I would say I didn’t have one I not in there anymore and they would ask me how am I going to build my audience? Now I was totally confused because I know there are plenty of authors who have never had social media and their books and presents are well-known In the writing industry. So I began searching for authors who didn’t use social media and a lot of them did traditional publishing. That's when an author goes through a company to publish their work and then I started seeing self-publishing and I was wondering what it was and that’s when an author publishes and promotes their work without any company. So I started to notice most authors were no longer traditional publishing and most moved to self-publishing. Now it was my job to decide what route I was going to take and based on my research I decided to do self-publishing, I had no idea what this was going to be like so I started building my social media profiles and I became so frustrated because remember I haven’t been on social media in years so everything so so confusing and trying to understand an algorithm that changes every chance they get, took up a lot of time from writing my book. Social media can be fun but it’s a lot of work that I never imagined. Trying to find beta readers can be a challenge but when you do find them it’s a plus, I had to find readers who would be interested in reading fiction, I was scared to ask the people in my group because they all had great work and I didn’t want them to laugh at me I wanted to improve my skills more before I asked them and that was a lot for me because I didn’t have any friends close to me that like reading fiction, I appreciate my readers that I did find they helped me overcome my fears with their complaints thanks readers love yall. So to end things here my tips for anyone struggling to write their book just be patient, pray, ask god for guidance on your journey, and never doubt yourself trust what you know and make it work for you put God first. Subscribe to my newsletter my book updates
