A funny thing happened on the way to Phase 4 of reopening: I stopped stressing about my writing.
This isn’t to say I stopped caring about my writing. But I stopped having the “wake up in the middle of the night terrified I’d made a colossal life mistake” panic attacks that I’d had pre-pandemic.
See, I’ve only been freelancing for two years. I left my nonprofit career in my early 40s to write for newspapers and magazines. The first thing I did when I made the change was to read all the writing books, subscribe to all the writing magazines, highlight all the writing articles, and take all the writing courses. And from them, I learned one thing: “If you want to be successful, you MUST write every day. You MUST read every day. You MUST pitch ideas or submit stories to editors every day. Anything short of that, and you’re not really a writer.”*
(*This isn’t verbatim, of course. It’s just what my inner voice told me as I read/subscribed/highlighted, and it’s the message that stuck with me long after I finished the books/magazines/articles/courses.**)
(**Come to think of it, Stephen King did say in On Writing that, “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” So, you can see how this “You MUST…” idea first got stuck in my head.)
