I just realized something amazing that’s been happening to me.
(It’s actually not amazing at all, considering I make my living writing for others. Awful is more accurate.)
I’ve been living through about three months of almost constant writer’s block. Every day, every assignment is like pulling teeth.
These are well-paid assignments. Assignments from people and brands I love and respect. People who I want to impress. Who have allowed me to interview incredibly smart people, capture their thoughts on cutting edge topics in long form, and put that out into the world to change lives.
And yet… the cursor would taunt me for hours, turning a simple 3-4 hour assignment into a torturous 1-2 day process.
So, what happened?
Well, three months ago is about when I reached a new level of leadership and ownership over B2BWI, and when we began really picking up traction.
For three months, I’ve spent every day telling thousands of people how important B2B writing is, how to write it, and sharing examples of the good stuff.
I’ve been reading about self-limiting beliefs, the importance of a CEO mindset, and thinking about big picture strategy…
All things that make me very nervous when I sit down in front of an empty page.
I’ve been all up in my head, expecting every line to shoot out perfectly the first time, then lamenting how far my work falls from the perfect vision of it in my mind.
But no more! I’m excited to see how this revelation takes the pressure off.
And to embrace the only real error in writing, which Stanley Fish talks about in his book How to Write a Sentence — And How to Read One:
“Many people are put off writing because they fear committing one more more of the innumerable errors that seem to lie in wait for them at every step of composition. But if one understands that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships and that the number of relationships involved is infinite, one understands too that there is only one error to worry about, the error of being illogical, and only one rule to follow: make sure that every component of your sentences is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous (unless ambiguity is what you are aiming at).”