Into the Unknown.

It’s a scary business, this. Trying something new.

I mean, I write as a pastime. My first novel has had its first beta read and I’m editing it now (or trying to! It’s not easy with a toddler in the house.) I even purge my soul with a bit of poetry when my mental health is at a low ebb.

Trying to make a career out of freelance writing, though, feels like a huge step into the unknown. Always my worst critic and serious under-estimator of my own abilities, I find myself plagued with self-doubt. I’m absolutely convinced, as I have been with most aspects of life at one time or another, that I’m not good enough. I hold a firm belief that I don’t have any knowledge or experience worth documenting.

I’ve given it a half-hearted attempt before, but got so scared of rejection that I never pitched a single paid gig. Two pieces were published on The Mighty to get the ball rolling on my portfolio, and I created my first blog on the subject of life as an anxiety sufferer. That’s as far as things went.

Two things went wrong that time:

1)      My aforementioned lack of courage and self-belief to put myself out there.
2)    I chose the wrong niche for my blog.

It seemed like a really good idea at the time. Anxiety has been quite a dominating factor in my life for the past 28 years and shows no signs of ever fully dissipating. However, it does tend to occur in phases. The good times provided me with no content at all, while the bad times left me striving to find positive messages for my readers when I didn’t feel positive myself, because the last thing I wanted was to bring them down into my pit of despair. (There’s a good chance I may not have even had any readers besides my mum, but this is beside the point.)

Ultimately, I decided I didn’t want my mental illness to define me, so down came the blog.

Now, this isn’t a “How to become a blogger” blog by any stretch of the imagination, but if I were to offer one piece of advice on choosing a niche, it would be to make sure it’s something you’ll feel happy and comfortable writing about for the foreseeable future.

After quite some time of only focusing my writing efforts on my novel and the odd bit of poetry, I’m ready to give things another go. I’m going to make an effort to put my work out there by actually building a portfolio and making pitches. There. It’s right here in black and white in the public domain now. That means I have to do it.

I’m not an expert. Not even close. I’ve read blog post after blog post on how to get started and still feel completely unprepared and inadequate. What makes these feelings worse is that I can’t seem to find anything online written by people feeling the same way. All the writing blogs I’ve found read like manuals for making a successful career out of writing. That’s great! Really. Sometimes sound and rational advice and step by step guidance is what’s needed. But I wish I could just find something by one person that was written at a time when they didn’t have their shit together; when they were taking their first tentative steps out into the freelancing and blogging world, thinking that they’d never be good enough to make their dream a reality.

That’s why I’ve chosen this as my new niche, I guess. I’ll always love writing, so I’ll always love writing about writing. And if there’s nothing in a Google search about the writer’s journey from winging it and hoping for the best to actually achieving one’s goals (or not) then maybe I should be the one to provide it.

Maybe, in the process, I can make someone like me feel less alone in their cluelessness.

V.