Permission to take your time

On the cost of moving fast before you’ve decided anything

Isn’t it interesting how many appeals to potential writers rush you?

It starts before you even open a document. “Just write a bad first draft.” “Don’t overthink it, just start.” “You’re thinking too much — you need to do.”

Forward motion matters in most things we experience in midlife. There’s the habit building, the value in compound interest, the progress we make when we do things regularly.

But there’s also a cost to speed. (Think about every woman who’s ever started a Couch to 5K running program and ended up with a strained muscle because she went too far too fast, or lifted too much in her class and ended up sidelined for a month … hypothetically speaking, of course.)

In writing, the risk is different. It’s the speed at which you’re moving so fast that you haven’t actually decided anything. You’re reacting. You’re following the momentum of “I should write a book,” not the clarity of “I’m choosing to tell this story, and here’s why.”

The women I talk to who have regrets in their memoir process didn’t regret it because they moved slowly. They regret it because they moved carelessly.

They didn’t think through what belonged in the story. They didn’t ask themselves the hard relational questions. They didn’t make deliberate choices about what they were willing to expose, what they were protecting, what they could live with once it was out in the world. Then they got halfway through and realized they’d made a mess they’d have to untangle.

Thinking deeply before you write isn’t avoidance. It’s the opposite. It’s the difference between writing fast and writing with intention. It’s the difference between hoping it works out and knowing what you’re choosing.

I see women with stories that matter—stories that could help someone, stories that deserve to be told—but they freeze because they don’t have the framework to think them through first.

That’s why I do the work I do.

Originally published on my Substack.

If you liked this article, you may also like this one: What I wish someone had said to me before I began