Write. Just Write.

As writers we're constantly searching for ways to make ourselves, and our work, better. We follow every writing account on social media. We listen to podcasts and sign up for email subscriptions. We buy books that tell us how to write a book. We do all this in the hopes that what advice we manage to actually retain will make us better writers. Perhaps some of them will stick, but in all honesty, you'll forget most of them the second after you read them. And that's okay; we're not going to remember everything. If we did, writing probably wouldn't be the profession we'd choose to pursue.

There is one piece of advice you should always keep with you though, and that is this: just write.

Seems a little redundant, right? Perhaps a little too simple. You're thinking, 'What difference could these two words possibly make in my writing?'.

A whole heck of a lot, actually.

What good are those tips and how-to's you spent hours sifting through, plucking the best from the useless, if you aren't writing? You don't have to write perfectly the first time. No one ever writes perfectly on the first draft. Best selling authors never send in their first draft, and if they don't send in their second, they'll send in their third. Maybe even their fourth! They don't get it perfectly on their first try, and neither will you. If you expect to though, you'll be sorely disappointed, and (in my experience) discouraged.

The issue with stuffing our brains full of all these tips is that, that is what we focus on while writing. Not only did we spend five hours surfing the web for these tips, they're now hindering our writing process. So instead of focusing on the essence of our work, we're second guessing ourselves:

'That sentence structure doesn't seem right.'

'That one article said I shouldn't do it this way, so maybe I should do it another way.'

'I read that this word is overused, so I should find something else.'

Yes, all of those things are important. The sentence structure should be correct, and you want to be original in your writing and use diverse (but proper) vocabulary. But on your first go 'round, these things aren't what you want to focus on.

Think of writing as a recipe. They're similar in that the first try can always be improved upon. Perhaps you added too much salt or not enough. Maybe it could use a dash of pepper. Or, after looking it over, you realize it could use a little something else, so you throw some parsley in there for a bit of flair. You fine tune it, with a few tweaks here and there, until you get it right. By the time you've reached the perfected "recipe", the one for the family's cookbook, you realize you've actually utilized all those tips you'd been needlessly focusing on before.

The more you write, just write, the easier it is to use all those tips you'd found. Once you knock out that first draft, you go back and you apply all that you learned to make good work great. And when you review it a third time, if great isn't good enough for you, reapply those tips and tricks to make it exceptional.

You'll get there, I promise.

It will take time, the patience of a Saint, and probably all of your sanity, but it will be worth it all in the end.

All you need to remember is to just write. Everything else will come with time.