The hardest part of writing a novel wasn’t putting one hundred thousand words on paper—it was realizing I might never let anyone read them.
Not because I don’t want people to read my novel. I swear, I do. But simply because I might procrastinate the rest of my life away before I even consider attempting a second draft. It’s been, after all, eight whole months since I finished writing the first draft. What’s another sixty years of this?
At first, taking a break felt like the right thing to do. Every experienced writer will tell you that once you finish a first draft, it’s recommended to “let it rest for a while” and “get some space from it.” Perfect, I thought. After writing every day for nine months to finish the first draft, I was due for a much-needed respite.
Then, somewhere along the way, as I reveled in the carefree bliss of my hiatus, I stumbled upon the query letter that Shelby Van Pelt wrote to attract an agent for her novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. For those unfamiliar, a query letter is the thing you send out to dozens of literary agents in desperate hope that one sorry fool will be delusional enough to think your manuscript is worth taking a peek at. It’s like a cover letter for your novel.
At the bottom of Van Pelt’s query letter, she mentions all the literary magazines and journals where her short stories had been published. And I thought to myself: Dang, I’m going to need to get some short stories published to legitimize myself as a writer.
So, I did what you’d expect—I deprioritized the second draft of my novel and wrote a short story.
And then I wrote another.
And another.
What great progress! Wow! Amazing!
And then something unexpected happened.
I couldn’t bring myself to work on a second draft of any of the short stories, either. I was procrastinating on revising my novel by procrastinating on revising the short stories.
To put it simply: there were layers to this madness.
Layers upon layers of procrastination.
It was a strange phenomenon, straddling somewhere between paralyzing self-doubt and crippling perfectionism, in which the thought of returning to any of these stories to work on a second—or, God forbid, a third and final—draft seemed a foolish impossibility.
In truth, I couldn’t even bring myself to talk about what I’d written with anyone, let alone finalize it for submission.
It’s exhausting, isn’t it, how much we hear about procrastination these days? We are bombarded, incessantly, with endless psychological explanations for why we don’t accomplish our to-do lists and relentless reminders that we must do more with the short lives we live. I’ve watched every YouTube video, read every self-help book (looking at you, Atomic Habits), and tried every tactic to become a more productive—and allegedly fulfilled—person.
And yet!
I still could not bring myself to finish a short story to publish.
Isn’t it funny how we convince ourselves we are making “progress,” when in reality, we’re just putting off the thing we need to do?
So I asked myself: What is really stopping me?
Time and again, the same word kept popping up: uncertainty.
I realized my life was riddled with it, that it had seemingly burrowed into every crease and crevice of my existence. To prove a point, I made a short list.
Things I’m Uncertain About:
The list could go on, trust me, but we’d be here all day.
I’m sure that you, too, feel uncertainty dominates aspects of your life. There’s no avoiding it. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m uncertain about how the final stretch of this newsletter will end.
But let me try to stick the landing.
The only antidote to uncertainty I’ve found is:
You embrace it.
Yes, that’s right—embrace uncertainty. Oh, what glorious wisdom! What profound insight! Embracing uncertainty—certainly nobody has ever thought of that before!
It’s a bunch of hogwash, isn’t it? Advice like this—“embrace uncertainty”—is exactly the kind of thing you’d find in a listicle about what to do when you’re feeling unsure. It’s all so painfully obvious, so vaguely meaningless, that it becomes difficult to discern how to actually implement it into one’s life.
So what does embracing uncertainty actually look like?
For me, it looks like this:
Earlier this week, I sat down with a short story I wrote, read it line by line, made changes to it, and then went back again and made some more changes. I read it out loud, once, twice, three times, until I decided it was what it was—that I had captured the essence of what I was trying to say, and that no further changes would make a considerable difference.
Then, I started searching writing database sites, looking for literary magazines and journals—dozens of them—scouring through lists to find one that wasn’t too big or too small, one that felt just right, where I’d have a fighting chance of getting published.
And then, I did the unthinkable.
I did the thing I’d been putting off for months: I submitted my short story for publication.
And not just to one place. I submitted it to five literary journals.
And do you know what happened?
I felt a sense of accomplishment so profound that it genuinely energized me in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time—as if my soul had been fed, as if the universe picked me up, cradled me in its arms, and said, “Thank you for doing that thing I asked you to do.”
And will the short story get accepted? Probably not.
But I can’t wait to get my first rejection, because it will mark me as a real writer—not one who sits atop mounds of unfinished works, but one who sees things through, despite the depraved malice of uncertainty working against them.
So please, for the love of God, figure out the one thing you are avoiding, and just do it.
The hardest part of writing a novel wasn’t putting one hundred thousand words on paper—it was realizing I might never let anyone read them.
Not because I don’t want people to read my novel. I swear, I do. But simply because I might procrastinate the rest of my life away before I even consider attempting a second draft. It’s been, after all, eight whole months since I finished writing the first draft. What’s another sixty years of this?
At first, taking a break felt like the right thing to do. Every experienced writer will tell you that once you finish a first draft, it’s recommended to “let it rest for a while” and “get some space from it.” Perfect, I thought. After writing every day for nine months to finish the first draft, I was due for a much-needed respite.
Then, somewhere along the way, as I reveled in the carefree bliss of my hiatus, I stumbled upon the query letter that Shelby Van Pelt wrote to attract an agent for her novel Remarkably Bright Creatures. For those unfamiliar, a query letter is the thing you send out to dozens of literary agents in desperate hope that one sorry fool will be delusional enough to think your manuscript is worth taking a peek at. It’s like a cover letter for your novel.
At the bottom of Van Pelt’s query letter, she mentions all the literary magazines and journals where her short stories had been published. And I thought to myself: Dang, I’m going to need to get some short stories published to legitimize myself as a writer.
So, I did what you’d expect—I deprioritized the second draft of my novel and wrote a short story.
And then I wrote another.
And another.
What great progress! Wow! Amazing!
And then something unexpected happened.
I couldn’t bring myself to work on a second draft of any of the short stories, either. I was procrastinating on revising my novel by procrastinating on revising the short stories.
To put it simply: there were layers to this madness.
Layers upon layers of procrastination.
It was a strange phenomenon, straddling somewhere between paralyzing self-doubt and crippling perfectionism, in which the thought of returning to any of these stories to work on a second—or, God forbid, a third and final—draft seemed a foolish impossibility.
In truth, I couldn’t even bring myself to talk about what I’d written with anyone, let alone finalize it for submission.
It’s exhausting, isn’t it, how much we hear about procrastination these days? We are bombarded, incessantly, with endless psychological explanations for why we don’t accomplish our to-do lists and relentless reminders that we must do more with the short lives we live. I’ve watched every YouTube video, read every self-help book (looking at you, Atomic Habits), and tried every tactic to become a more productive—and allegedly fulfilled—person.
And yet!
I still could not bring myself to finish a short story to publish.
Isn’t it funny how we convince ourselves we are making “progress,” when in reality, we’re just putting off the thing we need to do?
So I asked myself: What is really stopping me?
Time and again, the same word kept popping up: uncertainty.
I realized my life was riddled with it, that it had seemingly burrowed into every crease and crevice of my existence. To prove a point, I made a short list.
Things I’m Uncertain About:
The list could go on, trust me, but we’d be here all day.
I’m sure that you, too, feel uncertainty dominates aspects of your life. There’s no avoiding it. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m uncertain about how the final stretch of this newsletter will end.
But let me try to stick the landing.
The only antidote to uncertainty I’ve found is:
You embrace it.
Yes, that’s right—embrace uncertainty. Oh, what glorious wisdom! What profound insight! Embracing uncertainty—certainly nobody has ever thought of that before!
It’s a bunch of hogwash, isn’t it? Advice like this—“embrace uncertainty”—is exactly the kind of thing you’d find in a listicle about what to do when you’re feeling unsure. It’s all so painfully obvious, so vaguely meaningless, that it becomes difficult to discern how to actually implement it into one’s life.
So what does embracing uncertainty actually look like?
For me, it looks like this:
Earlier this week, I sat down with a short story I wrote, read it line by line, made changes to it, and then went back again and made some more changes. I read it out loud, once, twice, three times, until I decided it was what it was—that I had captured the essence of what I was trying to say, and that no further changes would make a considerable difference.
Then, I started searching writing database sites, looking for literary magazines and journals—dozens of them—scouring through lists to find one that wasn’t too big or too small, one that felt just right, where I’d have a fighting chance of getting published.
And then, I did the unthinkable.
I did the thing I’d been putting off for months: I submitted my short story for publication.
And not just to one place. I submitted it to five literary journals.
And do you know what happened?
I felt a sense of accomplishment so profound that it genuinely energized me in a way I hadn’t felt in a very long time—as if my soul had been fed, as if the universe picked me up, cradled me in its arms, and said, “Thank you for doing that thing I asked you to do.”
And will the short story get accepted? Probably not.
But I can’t wait to get my first rejection, because it will mark me as a real writer—not one who sits atop mounds of unfinished works, but one who sees things through, despite the depraved malice of uncertainty working against them.
So please, for the love of God, figure out the one thing you are avoiding, and just do it.
