The Creativity Project: Mistakes
Moving forward while stumbling.
My debut novel just came out and I’ve made a ton of mistakes with it. The majority of them being my marketing, or lack thereof. I’m an introvert and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve watched one too many videos on how to market your book and ended up with analysis paralysis.
Obviously, not something I can fix now, but I can look at what I did do and adjust accordingly going forward.
One good thing I did have was my friends who rallied behind me. The amount of support and shares my posts got was incredible and I need to lean into my village more.
I also realized, as I updated my writer notebook, that I have been screwing up my plotting process for a year, maybe even longer. Last year, I used a Happy Planner as my goal tracker for my writing and I put the beat sheet for Romancing the Beat in the back of the planner. I used it religiously for the entirety of the year to plot my books. It was great.
But in actuality, it wasn’t. I missed an entire plot point when I set it up. I thought something felt off, but I didn’t go back and double check my work because I wouldn’t screw up something so massive.
I’m lucky that my brain made sure that the missing section showed up in the novels, just not the notes that I write while I’m plotting.
But I’m learning. Every mistake I make is just another opportunity to grow in my process as a writer. I now know that my friends will rally behind me and that I should go back and check in with my process every quarter or so to make sure everything’s working the way it should.
Every failure could be a stopping point if I let it, but I no longer let that little voice in my head silence me. I will be a success, no matter how many failures it takes.
