This is Wonderwahl

'Of course your first draft is going to be bad! It's going to be terrible.'

Procrastination, it’s the word of millennials. Both a dirty yet proudly spoken word, it encapsulate the social mood of note, and as I write this I cannot escape its effects. For every time I have sat to write this first article, I have twice over attempted to even start my own corner of the internet. The reasons behind my procrastination differ: laziness (the obvious reason), time, (or lack thereof), the panicking submergence of feeling this has all been done before or, finally, the all-consuming insecurity of the worth of my writing.

Literacy has played a huge part of my life, from a young age I spent every waking hour with my nose in a book, to the point where I would get in trouble for reading too much – squinting in the darkness of bedtime desperate to cram in just one more chapter, hour long soaks in the bath, car journeys, forgoing completing chores and, in a time before iPhones, books would accompany to every single toilet visit. In my teenage years I was able to explore creating my own stories, finding a love for writing short fiction and leading me to university to study journalism (where I quickly realised I did not want to be a journalist, not in the traditional ‘legacy media’ sense anyway). In a sense it’s inevitable that my journey lead me here, writing my own articles solely dedicated to literature.

Reaching this conclusion was not as easy as you would think. It’s all too easy to get sucked into this Instagram world where there are influencers galore, and so to find my voice amongst the plethora of writers and internet successes caused a procrastination which lasted for over a year (no joke).

So I stripped back to the basics. Writing feels natural to me and I missed doing it. After deciding that the path of newspaper journalist was not for me I hung up my pen and paper and left my creative writing to dust in the corner of my mind. And while becoming a e-commerce Business Analyst has given me a sense of pride and enjoyment working in the fashion industry, my fingers twitched with the longing to write again. Books were the constant in my life, my specialist subject - and they say write what you know.

With my content topic decided, first was the fear of the quality of my work and - bear with me here - what revived me was a quote from a Netflix original film: Set it up. The main character, Harper, has a similar conundrum to me - crippling writers block caused by the elusive self-doubt monster, and it is her best friend who delivers the, for me, award winning line:

“Of course your first draft is going to be bad! It's going to be terrible. Then what do you do?[...] you go back and you make it better. Because you can't make it better until you actually do it.”

After deciding that the quality of my writing should not diminish my love of writing I was then struck by my second conundrum - the volume of ‘writers and bloggers’ in the world. Feeling tentative as I create my website, knowing that there must be millions of young women like me out there doing the very same thing, I was comforted by an article I read in The Times Sunday magazine by India Knight. I may think the internet is inundated with bloggers like me but as India Knight put it: ‘The internet used to be fun’. Gone are the days of getting lost down a rabbit hole of blog after blog. She suggests Twitter and Podcasts have killed the blog, and I have to agree. Not that I dislike either of those mediums (in fact I am a self-confessed podcast addict), but in a world of fast consumerism; snippets of punchy snappy opinion has overtaken the labour of love that is blogging. And what does this mean? It means: ‘What we have lost is intimacy. And, with the demise of those personal websites, we have lost the sense that it is OK to live a flawed, ordinary life, and that such a life can also be rich and interesting‘. India hits the nail on the head.

I felt it too, finding it a chore to look for decent websites to explore, even the well-established sites leave little to the imagination, becoming predictable or repetitive and this has given me the confidence to get back on my writing pedal and take on the challenge to fill some of that internet void - if only at least for my self.

I hope this Substack will become a go to for people interested in literature and thought pieces, opinions and shared experiences. I believe books create a simple but powerful connection between humans, knowing that another out there has read a line from a book and felt a tug at their heartstrings the same as you have, or even simply finding shared experiences its characters knowing that the author has understood something about you. These articles might not save the world or be of a topic of much highbrow substance, but if it can create that feeling of connection which feels lacking in a world so technologically advanced in communication, then I know I have brought some joy and fun back to the internet for someone out there just like me.

And so here I present to you, my very bad, terrible awful, garbage of a first article - note the cliched title. But, it’s written, I’ve done it and may it be smite with every criticism and scrutiny but I don’t care. I’m on my way and I’m excited for the growth of my writing and this Substack. I hope everyone enjoys this labour of love of mine and mostly I hope you will find a shared connection through the thing I love most, the written word.