The #1 BIGGEST MISTAKE New Writers Make

we're sisters best friends and authors on a mission to help you stoke your creative fire and live the life of your dreams we believe that purpose fuels passion and that creativity is your secret weapon for Mass construction there's never been a better time to bless the world with your dream realized you're listening to the Kate and Abby show what's up guys welcome back to another episode of the Kate and Abby show today we are talking about the number one biggest mistake new writers make and it's something that Kate and I personally have not heard talked about before so we're bringing this to the table a interesting discussion to unpack and this mistake can destroy your entire story it can destroy every story you write and it can actually end your author career before it begins it is that big of a mistake seriously no exaggeration this mistake has ruined many writers who have who could have been great but they let this mistake get in their way and Destroy what could have been amazing storytelling so if that if that is if that is not a big bombshell to drop I don't know what is we are super excited to get into this topic and expose this and address this mistake and show you how you can stop doing this in your own writing and the path forward to a better more creative and happy writing experience so let's get into it but before we get into it we first have to take a moment to thank our amazing patrons you guys are what make this show possible you support this show you keep it alive you keep it free of sponsorships and that's the important thing so we want to bring you guys the best highest quality advice and discussions every other week and the way we do that is through your amazing Support over on patreon so thank you so much for your support over there and if you get value out of this podcast consider giving on the patreon at patreon.com thee Kate and Abby show we will leave the link below this video as well um and also another thing Kate and I do on only on patreon is a live monthly hangout session at the end of each month so when you're in the patreon community you can get access to watch those live sessions and hang out with us chat about your stories it's super fun we do it at the end of each month so we have one coming up for the end of October and we hope to see you there we treat it like kind of this like organic Meetup like if we were to all like if we all lived near each other it be like meeting up at a coffee shop and talking about our works in progress and we get to answer your questions and hear about what you're working on so it's it's really fun it's like a little bit of a small writers group pH it's nice I really love it yeah super fun so we hope to see you guys over there all tiers get access to that hangout session by the way so what whatever you can give helps the show tremendously and we appreciate your support okay let's get into this topic it's a big one the number one biggest mistake that new writers make is should we do like a drum roll being afraid to make mistakes so true this is such a loaded thing so many layers to this yeah so let's get into it the thing that you and I see a lot of new writers talk about is how they are afraid to make mistakes right and this over analysis and worry and self-doubt can do all the things that I mentioned in the intro it can stop you from writing the story you were meant to write and that you feel called to write it can end your author career because if you're afraid of making mistakes you never step outside that comfort zone where you have to make mistakes in order to get better gain experience and to learn experi I feel like and I feel like YouTube is loaded with videos that are titled like this one you know mistakes that new writers make and a lot of those videos like a lot of those the Articles and videos that you see are you know what they're calling to and why a lot of writers feel like oh there's something here I need to learn is because they're worried about making mistakes right and I think that every time that you're new to something and you're just starting out with it you're afraid of making mistakes and you're afraid of like the um the negative emotions that come with that like the self-doubt and the feeling of inadequacy that can sort of trip you up as you go through those experiences but those experiences are like they are they are the thing they're necessary they're just a part of it it's just a part of the process and I like to always take a step back and we were talking about this and look at why is it even being called a mistake that in and of itself is somewhere along the line someone decided that these things were mistakes these things that you hear commonly listed in in writing advice videos or articles or what have you it's just part of the process you cannot become a better writer without going through those things yeah just like you can't become a good Potter without probably wasting loads of Clay on different things that maybe won't turn out the way you expect them to but they're all a part of the learning process you won't ever become a really good painter if you don't just play and experiment and ruin lots of canvases quote unquote ruin I've done all of that and that should never be labeled a mistake that's why I said said you know ruin in quotes because it's not ruining it it's that is the learning process that is the artistic process that yeah that's what we're here for and the art is like we were talking about is so malleable yeah change like you were saying like painting uh making pottery making uh we were talking about making bread right making making bread is difficult and like it takes a lot of and error before you really figure out you know this is the best way to do it um and that experience you can only learn through the experience of doing it same with like music you can only learn through the experience of you know playing music and practicing and if you were afraid to practice music because you were going to make mistakes then you would never get better at it right but yet with writing it seems like there's a high number of writers who encounter what they call mistakes and it makes them so discouraged that they don't want to continue or perhaps it's causing them to judge their work as being not good enough simply because they feel they've made mistakes and that can cause such fear really of moving forward it can cause self-doubt and feelings of being not good enough and those are not things that are helping us in our journey so we need to be able to acknowledge that to notice that and to allow ourselves to let go of those feelings they're not helping us on our journey so we cannot hang on to them we need to look at this differently we need to frame this up differently in our minds instead of looking at it as a mistake look at it as a fun part of the process this is part of The Learning Experience yeah very true and it continues forever into your writing career like you and I all the time talk about about how we will write something and then go back and even that same day go back and read it and like change a bunch of things about it revise things edit things um so you could you know it depends on your perspective but I guess you could look at that as like well you made mistakes that you have to go back and fix yeah you do like you will forever you know you will never reach a point in your writing career where every single word comes out perfectly the first time like in the first draft you know it's like every time I sit down and read back through my work I change things I reward things I restructure things I take things out I delete Lots I add lots and that's not because it's riddled with mistakes it's just because I'm gaining experience every single day every single time I sit down to write and as I lean into that process I myself am evolving so my writing evolves with me your writing is going to evolve with you as you grow and change as a writer yeah exactly and so like as you gain this experience you you get better at what you're doing but you also to me the most valuable thing is not that you're getting better but that your relationship with the thing is changing you know your relationship with the process with writing with making mistakes and going back and fixing them um and that to me is a sign of true experience and mastering a thing no matter what it is it no longer has the power to negatively impact you when it doesn't come out right the first time you know a really good point like and that's the relationship thing like I was thinking about it with um martial arts because I was thinking about a video you showed me once by a martial artist who was talking about how he he was asked a question about um pain and how like you know do you not feel pain anymore cuz you're like so good at this and you know you're like a martial art machine and he said no it's not that I don't feel pain it's that my relationship with pain is different and I thought that was really profound in a lot of different ways because you can apply that to a lot of different things um and how I can apply it to writing is like your relationship with writing changes to the point where you're still deriving happiness from it but it it doesn't have like control over you that like if it's not perfect the first time you're like oh now I'm like whole day is destroyed and my whole mood is ruined my self-esteem is ruined because I'm like kind of measuring my sense of how good I am of a writer based on how perfect that you know that page came out or that chapter or whatever exactly you know so I think um it's like you are you are gaining experience and you are getting better as time goes on of course but also the other really important thing that's happening is that your relationship with your writing is changing and it should always be changing and I think that's a mark of like real experiences when you're no you're no longer like impacted negatively when something when you feel like oh I made a mistake it's just like oh well I can fix that right it's you don't even view it as a mistake anymore you view it as just part of the E and flow of the process we come up with so many labels for so many different things and I think the the more we can get away from those in every way in every area are of Life the better off we will be as living breathing Divine beings okay we're creators we are creative we have creative energy flowing through us and the more we can take off these constricting labels like that's a mistake that's good that I deem not good enough this is good enough for someone to read what if we just backed away from that and didn't didn't get so tripped up on this idea of making a mistake what if we took the label mistake and crumpled it up and threw it out the window and just let ourselves create however it naturally came to us just let yourself play Let Yourself explore let yourself experience that flow in that process yeah and we are constantly changing our work but we're not viewing it as oh that's a mistake that's a mistake I I can't believe that I did that and judging yourself for that especially I think many of um you guys there's quite a few of that are very young writers and we would you know like to encourage you to really latch on to this idea now make this your own now because this is something that will help you so much as you grow and mature in your craft don't beat yourself up for mistakes don't be afraid of making mistakes just lean into the process and enjoy the experience that you're gaining every single time you're learning such valuable lessons and we've talked many times about how each and every book that we write is so different from the next and so evolved in different ways like even the series we're writing together we're currently almost done we're like wrapping up book three and it's so different than the first book even but it's not that it's better or worse than but it's like you see the evolution even and and we didn't it's it hasn't even been that long since we wrote the first book yeah but it's just each and every time we sit down to write each and every day it's going to be a little bit different and it's cool cuz you're like growing with the character looking back at the first book cuz I'm like going through the first book as we start to edit it now and it's like I feel like you know oh these baby characters grown so much just over the past three books but it's funny because and then but you feel like you grew with them in a way you know cuz you gained experience and and new understanding new Enlightenment since you started writing that first book um yeah I feel like that too with my own uh Standalone books as well and it's really interesting because you learn something new through the process each time so like those things you can't learn any other way except by doing um and experiential learning is my favorite way to learn anything and I think it's the most valuable way to learn anything um and so a lot of times you can get into like this analysis paralysis of like I have to watch every video read every book you know read every article every blog post and really learn as much as I possibly can about this thing and while learning is good and can be very valuable um it can also put you into this state of like brain freeze of like well what if I haven't learned enough what if there's you know something else I need to write down and make notes about um something else I need to outline and structure before I can continue into just the journey I would say to anyone who feels that way chances are you're good and you can just go into the journey start the journey follow your intuition follow your creativity and then if you hit a roadblock and you feel like I need a little something else to help me springboard into the next part of this journey then that's a sign that you know maybe you can return to another source another resource to learn an additional thing that might help you on your path but a lot of times we doubt ourselves so much that we get stuck in like this rut of like overanalyzing something over and over again and in doing so you are robbing yourself of experience which is how you're really going to learn what you need to learn because if you think about it like you can do all the learning but then you have to go through all the experience as well it's not like you can learn instead of experiencing I always thought that about like you know um learning something classically versus like getting your hands on the actual job doing it like when you think about you could buy a whole bunch of books from a bookstore get them out a library about surviving in the wilderness yeah you could read about how to hike up mountains how to live off the land how to find food and build shelters and you could read hundreds of books on this subject matter but it is not the same thing as just going out there and living in the woods or going on hike or climbing a mountain you have to go actually experience those things if you want to have that life and experience those experiences and feel you know out there in nature you're not going to get it just from a book so it's it's kind of the same thing with something like writing that is going to be a very personal specific experience to you that's going to be your your hike your Mountain climb right you have to experience that for what it's going to be for you and what it's going to be for you is different than what it's going to be for anyone else so you can't really take anyone else's word for it you have to experience that and you have to lean into it and not be afraid of small things that might come up or discouraging days or discouraging sessions we all have those we all have those and it's just something that you work with not something you have to fight against I I think that's another thing people feel like our artists feel like they have to fight against these feelings of um you know not being good enough or you know having a bad session or not being able to to communicate something exactly how they want to like you don't have to rail against that you can accept it and realize okay that's how it came out and I'm going to just take that in my stride and just keep going just keep going just see what happens you know a lot of times it's not even like the thing itself is like the analysis of it that's freaking you out like you're saying about surviving the Wilderness like if you just if you suddenly just had to survive in the wilderness even if you never read anything about it and you weren't prepared it would probably be less intimidating than if you were trying really hard to prepare yourself to survive in the wilderness and then you go out and you're like okay I know this is going to be really scary experience this I'm really intimidated now but I have all this knowledge so I can do this but you're like already you're like anticip painting all of these really challenging things versus like if you just had to experience it you would still learn all those same things through the experience I mean you might die in the process so that probably wouldn't be good but like it's good to have some knowledge so there's a good this is a good analogy because it's good to have some knowledge going into it to save your life but you also can get to the point where like you're learning so much that you're actually just talking yourself out of actually doing it you know right yeah I writers that you're just overthinking you're overthinking it to the point now the more you think about it the scarier and bigger it becomes right to actually do you know exactly yeah and thankfully with something like writing there's a lot more margin for right error yeah if you want to call that you're not going to you're not going to lose your life to you'll live through it no matter what so that's a good thing you'll live through a bad writing session or you know a session you didn't feel happy about whatever but the thing is is to to change your perspective like aby's saying don't overthink it just throw yourself into it and see what happens don't be afraid of making mistakes yeah you have nothing to lose you have absolutely nothing to lose you have everything to gain because every single time you sit down it's going to feel better it's going to feel more familiar it's going to feel like familiar landmarks familiar ground yeah exactly yeah so lean into the mistakes lean into the process and especially in the first draft especially if you're like starting to do um if you're going to do nanoro in November or if you're starting a new book or you're working on a a new project right now and maybe it's your first time or maybe it's um maybe you've been writing for a while regardless of what you're working on and how long you've been doing it if you're working on like a first draft and you're just getting all these amazing creative ideas out of your head onto the page that is tremendously awesome and in another itself is like so so great it's it's exactly what it needs to be if you are leaning into the creative process and you're chasing those butterflies of creativity as I like to say and you are just letting your inspiration run wild that is what you should be doing and don't worry about it don't sweat it in the first draft because everything is fixable everything is rewritable and that's something that has really helped me recently and given me a lot of a lot more creative Clarity um is to embrace the idea that it doesn't have to be perfect when it comes out the first time and that everything is rewritable and that almost like when when when you get really experienced at rewriting something you don't even have to write it well the first time because and it gives you this interesting sense of confidence of like well actually it doesn't even need to be per perfect or great the first time because I can go back to it and I can embellish I can revise it I can rewrite it I can breathe new life into it and this is something that I've learned experientially through writing through rewriting old manuscripts um so over the past over the summer I rewrote a 10-year-old manuscript and it was a really fun process because the original ideas were so good and a lot of the original story was very close to my heart and I loved it love the characters love the conflicts there was so many aspects of it that I loved um but I ended up read rewriting it um almost word for word there was some dialogue and stuff that I copied over and salvaged from the previous draft but all of the scenes I rewrote I enhanced them made them better and I found a lot of I discovered a lot of uh confidence and an interesting new like I guess side skill aspect of writing that is taking something that was really good and making it great um and if if you can lean into that process and really find joy in that process the same kind of joy you can find in you know starting with new ideas that is something that will make you a better writer it will make you more confident in your own skills and it'll give you a lot of experience that you couldn't get otherwise um and so what I've learned through doing that is that you know you don't have to be afraid to write write something not as great in the first draft because you can always go back and make it better right ex no no pressure you have nothing to lose yeah it doesn't end when you write the end if you write the end I usually never do but um like when you hit that last closing word that's really only in so many ways just the beginning of the process you're going to be going back through so many times and there were some of my favorite scenes from The Blood Ray series my series which you can find with the links below um I some of my favorite scenes are scenes I went back and wrote Into the book long after I finished it long after I went through it several times and it even went to my editor and I ended up writing scenes in there that I absolutely love now so it's not something that you have to oh now that I finished I wrote that last word it's done you know I can't do anything else to it that's in so many ways you're at the starting line of the process right you can really do so much to it it's all malleable it's all able to be changed yeah exactly and all those things can be like spring boards for new ideas they can be opportunities you can look at those mistakes as new opportunities instead of like oh I messed up I I shouldn't have written that scene or like that scene was too long or Too Short or something instead of looking at it as a negative thing look at it reframe it in your mind and think of it as an opportunity for something new here okay now what can I how can I take this and make it better make it more interesting make it more layered make it more make it something that will make you love the characters more and make you care more about the story um and and that little mindset shift will do incredible things for not just your writing but your whole life in general because it's really it that is like a mindset difference right it's it's looking at something that is maybe not as impressive as you want it to be and asking yourself how can I what new life can I breathe into this thing to make it different more interesting more layered more um engaging right and like I always like to say too you can't sit in the seat of the critic and the Creator at the same time you have to be in one or the other yeah so if you want to be the Creator you have to let go of this idea that you have to be your own critic and for some of you that might be a kind of painful process to let go if you're really used to you know perhaps you have a habit of judging your own work or you know a habit of judging what you do you have to really step back and look at you know you're not here doing this this beautiful Act of creating this art you're not doing that just to to judge it that's not your purpose in this what what you're doing is really sacred and it's something you're you're here to enjoy it's here to bring you Joy it's here to bring other people Joy it's not something that you need to be judging yourself on that's never that never was the intention of art so I think that's you know a little bit more of a broader overarching concept but it's something worth considering it's worth thinking about yeah I agree 100% I love that that you can't be in the seat of the critic and the Creator at the same time that's really profound yeah I love that yeah and that's very true and and I know a lot of writers struggle with the inner critic I've struggled a lot with the inner critic and it's it is a mindset shift you have to you have to let go of that release that and just step into the role of the Creator because the Creator is like you know like you were as a little child you didn't criticize yourself you didn't judge yourself you just created for the joy of creating and that's why children 5 years old and under are usually have genius level creativity I mean there are studies showing that they have genius level creativity why is that it's because they're not being judged and they're not judging themselves um there are so many interesting studies and findings connected to that but I really think it has to do with the lack of criticism happening in that sphere it's just a pure creativity and joy um and it's beautiful it's a beautiful thing so that's the number one biggest mistake if you want to avoid one mistake one mistake only the biggest mistake is to be afraid of making mistakes don't be afraid of making mistakes make them embrace them have fun with what you do enjoy it to the fullest and reframe how you're looking at mistakes they aren't something bad they aren't something negative they can be they can easily become opportunities for growth and creativity and inspiration you just it just all depends on how you look at it it's all a matter of perspective yeah so find joy in your writing we wish you Joy this nanor rimo or whatever you are working on whenever you're watching or listening to this podcast hopefully you have drawn some inspiration from this discussion today and can go forth into your writing with some new perspective on your beautiful work that you bringing into the world thank you guys so much for listening and joining us today again thank you to our amazing patrons who help us make this show possible and who keep this show free of sponsorships we love you guys so much and if you get value out of this podcast go to patreon.com theate and Abby show to help us keep it going also the best way to support our individual author Journeys is to buy our books and Kate has an entire series of books amazing series that you need to read ASAP um awesome because like you can binge read the entire series and I always love that when I find a new series and like the whole thing is out and I can just keep reading reading reading through them all it's an awesome series yes six books so if you've been looking for a new Dynamic explosive amazing series check that out the links are in the description box and aby's new book the other world just came out recently so you can get that it's a beautiful Whimsical heartwarming story it's perfect for this time of year you're watching time and it's Autumn this is like a great time to uh grab a book that has a nice like heartwarming family centered theme to read with a cup of tea on a chilly day it's like the perfect Autumn read it's very cozy so you can find all of our books with the links Below in the description and yeah check out our writing if you haven't already it is truly the best way to support us as authors and we would love to share our stories with you smash that like button as well if you enjoyed this podcast and leave us a good rating on listening platforms that helps us out a lot as well comment below and tell us what you thought of this discussion do you ever feel like oh I'm so worried that I'm making so many mistakes with my writing and does that that self-doubt ever stop you from continuing on your creative Journey what is your experience with this and what have you learned through the process of writing we would love to hear all about it so share your journey in the comments below and we will see you guys in the next one until then stay stoked and rock on

Channel: Abbie Emmons

Views: 53,086

Keywords: how to write a novel, how to plan for nanowrimo, how to prepare for nanowrimo, nanowrimo 2023, how to outline a novel, writing advice, preptober, how to have confidence as a writer, how to not hate what you write, i hate all my writing, mistakes new writers make, amateur writing mistakes, newbie writer mistakes, biggest mistake new writers make, tips for new writers

Id: GNA9odCDLA4

Length: 30min 32sec (1832 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 16 2023