Christmas, COVID, friends, and a fall
...seems like I needed all of them to make me write this first post
I’ve been meaning to begin Write Well and Publish Wisely since last June, but…
It’s funny how hard it is for me to begin a new writing commitment. I’m sure that’s partly because of past experience: I loved writing a monthly column for more than a decade, and then a weekly blog for about seven years, but both of them are gone forever now.* Those losses hurt more than I have wanted to admit. I have dabbled with social media but it’s not really my thing, except for Quora (if that even qualifies as “social media”). That has been mostly a source of discouragement as far as writing commitments go. I got excited about Medium at one point, but only published one article there.
Why?
It isn’t that I don’t love writing (I do!) or that I don’t have anything to say (I do, I do!). And this particular Substack newsletter isn’t a casual thing like social media: I’m starting this to benefit my whole Wordsmith team and everyone we hope to serve. This newsletter is a natural extension of my love for that moment when the light of understanding dawns in someone’s eyes, dispelling the gloom of boredom or a long blustery night of frustration.
Resistance is real
Steven Pressfield describes “Resistance” in his masterpiece The War of Art (and its compact companion Do The Work). I’ve spent quite a bit of time and energy grappling with Resistance over the years, and I’ll share more of my insights here. It boils down to this: the vast majority of the Resistance I have to overcome is within me, not around me.
[yep, I am my own evil nemesis. This is a screenshot of my soul.]
The one Resistance insight that helped me begin this Substack at last was from an Enneathought email from just two weeks ago. It encouraged me to notice, to pay attention, to whatever it was that stopped or redirected me when I tried to sit and write this post. It promised that “presence and awareness [would] melt it, change it, break it down. And then we see that we don’t have to be controlled by [it].”
This was surprisingly uncomfortable. It was a mix of when I was first learning to meditate and when I was first learning pain tolerance: exactly like the first, and exactly opposite the second. It involved the same sort of “wow, it’s noisier inside my head than I realized” but required shutting down the practiced reflex of focusing on anything else besides the point of pain.
I’ll share more about what I learned from that experience later. For now I’ll just say it was humbling and enlightening in equal measure, and it got me writing, but it didn’t get me to finish and publish.
For that, I needed a bad case of COVID (my first, actually) to ensure that my Christmas and New Year involved very few people and lots of downtime; I needed colleagues who cared enough about me to exhort me to do what they knew I wanted to do; and, in the end, I even needed a skiing accident bad enough to keep me off the mountain and in a chair or bed for the last couple of days of that vacation time. You know what I do when I’m stuck in bed? I read. And, when other positive pressures have built up enough, it turns out that I also write.
I finish my first Substack post! Which I’m glad you are reading right now.
Not really about me, though
Normally, Write Well and Publish Wisely won’t be about me at all. It will be about you, your writing ambition, mindset, feelings, talent, craft, community, self-care, and the strategy and tactics you need to succeed— everything you need to write well and publish wisely, effectively, successfully.
In fact, I won’t always be the author of these newsletters. Some of the Wordsmith Writing Coaches team have agreed to contribute to it from time to time. Sometimes there will be a guest post from another colleague or friend of ours. Sometimes we’ll restack a great article we find here on Substack: check the Notes section of the site for those. My role is to write, and also to curate, the best content I can find for you.
You are the best part of this newsletter
The best content is content that addresses exactly the issues you face now, the doubts, questions, and frustrations that are front and center for you personally. From my decades of experience as an editor and writing coach, I can make some pretty good guesses about these; some are evergreen, and some arise from our current times. But you will prompt the best parts of this newsletter by asking questions, both personal and professional. Take the initiative. Tell me what you want to hear more about, push back against things I say that don’t fit your own experience. Take the initiative to share your troubles—and triumphs—with me, and thus with other authors too. It will make this whole experience richer, more relevant, more nuanced for everyone. Including me!
You can do that right now by leaving a comment on this very post…
When will I see you again?
You can expect at least one Write Well and Publish Wisely newsletter every week, plus something in each of our sections at least every five or ten days. So if you subscribe to Sara Anne Fox’s special screenwriting section So Whats The Story? you’ll get two emails per week. If you add The Martial Art of Scholarship and Steaming Heap of Shame, you might get as many as three posts per week; those will post more slowly but will pick up their publishing pace when a special event is approaching. We aren’t committing to posting on any particular day of the week at this point, but we might in the future.
Free subscribers get all our posts when they are published, but they will begin to slip behind the paid-subscriber paywall after a couple of weeks. So if you’re an eager reader you won’t miss a thing, and if you’re reading this via email, archive it for posterity. But if you’re joining us late, or only use the Substack app, you may need to support us to see all our best content.
Glad that we are in conversation at last!
It has been a long hard road to get me to this point, but now that I’m here, I am relieved. The weight has lifted from my shoulders; the road ahead stretches bright and open before me. I’m already drafting my newsletter for next week in my head.
I hope you’ll come along with us and add your voice to the conversation, as we explore the many ways to write well and publish wisely.
Grace and wisdom to you,
—Nic Nelson
Catalyst, Wordsmith Writing Coaches
(*I might rescue and re-publish that old blog someday, but for now, my newer one is here. It is glacially slow compared to most Substack newsletters.)