5 Tips To Help You Overcome Your Fear of Hitting Publish

After a year of writing, I’m no longer afraid

I’m an amateur writer.

After university, my writing experience consisted of work emails and mushy words in greeting cards. At my parent’s place one Christmas, I found an old assignment that I had scored 90% on with the following comment:

‘Great writing Geeta, have you ever considered becoming a journalist?’

I left University 15 years ago and the thought never crossed my mind. I didn’t study anything creative so how could I become a writer? Plus I’d forgotten the rules of grammar and punctuation learnt in school.

Tim Denning said something along the lines of:

If you can write business emails you can write online

So I thought I’d give it a shot. It took me three weeks to gain the courage to hit publish on my first article, even though it had been sitting in my drafts for two of those weeks.

Over time, the more I hit publish the easier it got. How was I ever to know whether my writing was any good unless it was out in public?

Fail in public, iterate in public and grow in public.

But none of this will happen unless you hit publish.

1. Forget What You Were Taught in English Class, Writing Online Is Different

Don’t spend endless hours obsessing about grammar and punctuation. Tools such as Grammarly and the Hemingway app can assist with that.

In our time-poor culture, people want to hoover content as quick as possible.

Obsess about being able to assemble your ideas logically. Make sure your ideas flow and are formatted in a way that makes it easy for the reader’s eyes to follow. Avoid large chunks of paragraphs.

Introduction:

• Explain what your article is going to be about
• Use the 1–3–1 sentence structure format. 1 opening sentence, followed by 3 sentences expanding on the first sentence. Then 1 final sentence to sum it all up.

Main Points

• Expand on your points in a logical order
• Use sub-headings and dot points
• Make sure your main points are on topic with the heading

Conclusion

• Sum up the main points or your takeaways for the reader. The majority of readers start at the intro and then read the conclusion. It’s here they decide whether they want to go back and read the main points or move on.

Focus on the structure and formatting of your writing, rather than making sentences sound like the ‘Queen’s English’ and it will make hitting publish a lot easier.

2. Anyone Can Do It

Anyone can write online — you don’t have to be special. Platforms such as Medium, Quora and Twitter make it easy for everyday individuals to express their ideas online.

The added beauty of these platforms is that they provide you with a built-in audience so you can focus on your writing rather than website creation and marketing.

Know that ideas are endless. Everyone has something to share about life, particular expertise or a situation. Lessons learnt, experiences gained and ‘how to’s’ written to provide value to your readers.

Writing is 95% overcoming the feeling that the ideas you have to share are obvious — they aren’t! ~ Nicolas Cole

3. No One Is Going To Read It Anyway

In the beginning, when audience numbers are small I used this mantra to help me push publish.

If I believed that no one would be reading my work then I had nothing to fear. I published into the abyss and if it caught someone’s attention then great, if not, I’d iterate and come back to hit publish again.

The biggest fear that prevents people from hitting publish is perfectionism. I used to think I’d be mortified if I hit publish and then found spelling mistakes.

I’m here to tell you that these fears never become reality. Even the best writers make mistakes and that’s ok because it allows you to learn. Medium also allows you to edit after publishing.

4. Focus On Adhering To Platform Guidelines

Every platform has its own guidelines. If you can stick with these then you’re 3/4 of the way there and hitting publish becomes easy.

Medium frowns upon clickbait and spam content and each publication also has its own rules.

Twitter allows a maximum of 280 characters and once published there is no ‘Edit’ button. But Tweets can be deleted.

Quora requires certain answers to be cited for credibility and affiliate links are not allowed.

5. FOMO In

Writing online can be a lonely daunting experience. I found that joining a cohort helped provide me with accountability, a supportive community and the opportunity to get my writing in front of engaged readers.

It motivated me to hit publish when I saw others were doing the same.

Starting out can be hard when you don’t have an audience and aren’t getting proper feedback. To kick-start my writing habit I joined Ship30for30 where we had to publish an atomic essay (250 words) every day for 30 days.

Each week they also provided lessons about ideas generation, headlines, formatting and data analytics. Because we were hitting publish daily we were also able to improve as we went along and analyse the results.

Every essay is published on Twitter which has the most users of any written publishing platform (600 million+). The more you hit publish the more the algorithm continues to share your writing with “similar” readers.

I fear not the man who has practised 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practised one kick 10,000 times ~ Bruce Lee

Repetition dissolves fear. The more you are forced to hit publish the more you become numb to the fear of rejection, bad feedback or zero claps.

Everyone Starts From Zero

If you have always wanted to write, what’s stopping you? Don’t get jaded by the articles with dollar signs promising you riches. Instead, remember that everyone has to start somewhere and writing is a long game.

Overcome your fear by repeatedly hitting publish and watch your confidence grow!