Jumping in Without Fear

The Powerful Paragraph

Hemingway once said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and bleed.” While I don’t share the notion that there is “nothing” to writing, I do share what Hemingway eloquently captures in this quote: fear. Okay, perhaps Hemingway wasn’t going for fear, per say, but what he is saying is that a writer dumps everything they have onto a page, especially when they are writing something personal and meaningful. After I wrote some of my first short stories, the idea of sharing them with anyone terrified me. But after some coaxing, I decided to share my stories with others, and it has completely changed the way I see this fear. Instead of shying away from the fear (which stemmed from my fear of judgment), I leaned in, implemented feedback I found helpful, discarded feedback that was not, and found that my writing was even better on the other side. Now I see the sharing aspect of writing as another helpful and important aspect of the writing process.