Believe in your idea. This is what I want to say to you today.
Believe in your idea. Even when you don’t believe in it. Keep taking small steps forward, even when they seem meaningless or minuscule or irrelevant.
Believe in the idea that wants to come into the world through you even when you are tired or too busy or overwhelmed by children and household and day job. Even when you think it will never happen. Even when it feels like doubt will break you in two.
That is what I want to say to you today, as I work through the substantive edit for A REAL SOMEBODY which will be published next summer.
Today I was scrolling through hundreds of photos that I took on my first research trip to Montreal and a wave of doubt washed over me. Looking at the photos brought back all the same doubt that gripped me every minute of my three week trip, as I walked all over the city, carrying my heart and the germ of my idea on my sleeve.
Today, as I worked through the edits, I read a comment from my editor, “This whole scene is so well described, I can picture it perfectly.”
First of all, thank goodness for editors who say the good stuff too. Because doesn’t that just make the whole process so much more motivating? And second, really? Isn’t that magical? Because I just looked at the photos of where that scene is set, and remembered the walk I took, and how lost I felt, and how there was an ice storm, and how long I was away from my family and how hard that was for all of us and how close I came to saying, just never mind.
DO NOT STOP. Believe in your idea, whatever it is.
That is all. As you were.