What took you so long to start writing?

All my life I yearned to write for myself, and yet could not put the pen to page. 

I once took a course when pursuing my MBA that had three major assignments, the biggest of which was to read a business book from a predetermined list, synthesize it in a two page essay, and then read and comment on other students’ essays. The course was online and we only met the teacher in person twice. 

I chose what I thought was the least “business-y” book on the list, Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. It is a tome: long, dense, and full of science-type stuff. What’s important to this story is the feedback I received. 

Mr. Becker, the grade is a flat A, but I don't want to leave it at that. You took the most complex book available and wrote it up beautifully, if you don't mind the term. My thought was: "Who IS this guy?" and since I ask for zero information about you as a person or professional on the "Who are you?" form, I have no clue. Are you somebody to whom I can be useful? 

This is not a brag, but context. I had received feedback like this in many of my English and writing courses. I also loved writing, and told anyone who would listen that I wanted to be a writer–or, rather more cheekily, that, “I am a writer, just not very consistently or publicly.” 

The truth is I had written very little. I collaborated on one short, photographic history book in 2018. Other than that, I had done nothing outside of work or school–nothing for myself. I was given much praise as a writer, and it was something I desparately wanted to be, but I never wrote anything. Why? 

Fear. 

But I did not know it was fear. 

In my career and personal life, I have tried to be hard-working and selfless, improving myself in the service of others. The people closest to me reflect back that I have been fairly successful at these two things. 

But with my writing “career?” I lived in this fantasyland that the world was waiting for me to write something, and once it was finished, people would rejoice. Friends, family, critics, and bestseller lists alike would be take time out of their day to extol how much my book mattered. 

Cringe. 

The truth is I was terrified of failing in public. I believed that when it came to your calling, you would be called. You would pull the sword out of the stone. The bush would burn. At least, this is the story I told myself. Really, I was terrified of publicly failing at something that mattered to me. In a chicken-or-egg situation, I am not sure whether the lie to myself or the fear came first, but the way they reinforced one another was the foundation of how I approached writing, which was, to not write at all, ever, unless work or school demanded it of me. 

I spent years studying how to outline, what writing voice is, what a writer’s website might look like, what genres are good to write in, what book sell well, how the most prestigious literary awards are awarded, what different writers’ process were–I tried pretty much anything that might make me a better writer except actually writing. 

Sometimes you learn a profound lesson that fundamentally alters your worldview and yet is humiliating to relay back to others because it betrays just how ignorant you were before you learned it. Last week, I enrolled in an online writing course called Write of Passage and learned one of these lessons. 

The lesson is this: you become a published writer by writing, and then publishing it. 

Explaining this epiphany in the context of the actual course would make it so obvious that some might miss it, so I will use a sports metaphor. Instead of writing, consider running. 

Before, a lot of people told me I looked like a runner, and a couple of times I walked very quickly, and people saw me and said, “you move like a gazelle,” or, “you could run ultramarathons.” I agreed, of course, and so I waited, searching for the ultramarathon that sang to my soul, where I would show up, untrained, and get first, making my debut as one of the world’s greatest runners. 

So, imagine you’re me. Write of Passage is like this: a friend who believes in your running ability says, “I heard about these people who run ultramarathons. You should check them out. You would fit in.” So you check them out. It looks good. You show up. Everyone tells you how the training group changed their lives. Many of them are crushing ultramarathons. Some of them are running marathons. Some of them just running 5K’s. All are happy and fulfilled. 

You can’t wait for them to show you which shoes to buy and ultramarathon you should run. Finally, these people will understand you. But instead they say, “OK, this week, go run for two minutes anywhere you want. Report back your time next week.” 

Record scratch. “Oh my God. This is what being a runner is: running.” Not shoe shopping. Not scoping out the right racecourse. Not watching YouTube technique videos. 

It is lacing up your shoes and putting one foot in front of the other–more quickly than normal.

The way this actually played out in the course is this: I signed up for the course based on one explicit promise on the website. That promise is you will learn to articulate your personal monopoly, which course founder David Perell defines as, “your unique intersection of skills, interests, and personality traits,” that will bring you the fame and fortune you want from your writing. (The way he actually describes it is much more measured, but this is how I read it.)

I even tried to prepare in advance: brainstorming, asking friends, looking at descriptions of the writers I admire so I could emulate their personal monopoly. In the course, I realized how wrong this approach was. I assumed I would sit down and carefully outline the boundaries of my personal monopoly in advance. 

In reality, finding my personal monopoly is an act of exploration, not cartography. It is the journey, the doing, the clearing of trails and putting in reps that uncovers your personal monopoly. 

There is an apocryphal story about Pablo Picasso sitting at a Paris cafe doodling on a napkin. Another patron recognizes him and asks to buy the napkin. He says she can have it for one million Francs. 

“One million Francs?” she asked. “That’s too much. It only took you five minutes to draw that.”

“No,” Picasso answered. “It took me forty years to draw this in five minutes.” 

The truth is, before discovering Write of Passage, I wanted to plan how I would effortlessly doodle my million franc napkin in five minutes. What I really needed was to get started on the messy, intensive forty years of practice. It took me longer than I liked to figure this out, but I do not plan to waste time now.