I Don't Know What I'm Doing Either

Showing up when everything's different and you don't feel like you have a clue

Welcome back to the Writer’s Secret Weapon. I’m John, and this is the space where I talk to you about writing without always talking to you about writing. The Secret Weapon is entirely reader-supported, so if you like what you’re reading, let me know.

here we go…

It starts in the morning

I woke up today and I still didn’t have 5 subscribers, I still didn’t have more than $250 in the bank, I still didn’t have a clear idea of how I was going to rebuild a build that previously made thousands of dollars a month at its peak.

It would be easy to quit. Go broke. Sell more of my shit. Beg friends for money. Try to convince them that I’m just a failure and not back on drugs. (Still clean, doesn’t matter if you believe me or not.)

In all my failures and faults, I seem to have failed at developing the skill of quitting and walking away, even when everything feels like it’s moved and the ground’s quicksand and marshmallows.

So here I am, writing this, with no idea of how I’m getting back to where I was.

Is that where I want to go?

But I don’t know if that’s my destination. Going back to where I was: burnt out, angry, bored, tired, disillusioned, that doesn’t sound really very appealing. Certainly doesn’t sound like fun. Going back there led me to crashing and burning for over a year, and that’s not something I’m eager to repeat.

So let’s not repeat it. Let’s not go back. Let’s go forward, because I can’t sit still either. Sitting still means I only have all the unfinished, broken, and failed things to look at. No one enjoys sitting in the wreckage, even when they’re convincing themselves that their best skills include ruining things.

Which leads me to ask: where do I want to go?

Destinations

Here’s what I know: Things are different now. There are different tools in play. There’s a different benchmark and threshold for publishable quality now. It’s a world of power tools and I’m the guy with the hand tools teaching people to use all the tools on the workbench to build their creative house.

Here’s what else I know: I still have confidence in my ability to teach the craftsman approach and I know that approach still works but I don’t know if anyone actually wants it.

So one of the destinations I want to get to is a place where I can say with some certainty that yes, there exists some portion of the writing populous who wants to actually learn how to write and learn how to improve their writing no matter what tool they’re using because their goal isn’t to churn out mediocre-but-sellable texts, it’s to make the book that’s lived in their head into a book they can read and share and oh by the way, sell it to people.

Kick rocks Candy

Have you met Candy? She’s the person trying to sell you a system or a pack of prompts or a course or some package deal that’s going to streamline, optimize, and 10x your writing business. She doesn’t give a fuck about your writing or your art or how you used to spend hours lost in a book. She doesn’t give one hot shit if you’ve dreamt of being a writer since middle school, and she damn sure doesn’t care about your life experience beyond what it can do for her bank account. To Candy, a writer is just another customer, just like your art is just another product that you’re selling after she’s done selling things to you. Candy fuels the capitalism carousel and she’s the one with the bland as old towels writing advice because to Candy art isn’t about inspiring and firing up the human spirit and brain, it’s about getting those sweet sweet cha-chings.

Fuck Candy. I am diametrically opposed to Candy.

The problem is that I work in a world where I gotta do what Candy does, just a little, because people insist that food and medication costs money and apparently some people still think that your human worth can be quantified to numbers in an account.

Here’s what I do, but the ground isn’t stable

I’m a writing coach who also happens to edit books. You can hire me to teach you how to write better (literally the name of the business), you can hire me to help you get unstuck. You can hire me to edit the book once you’ve got something down on the page.

That’s the stuff I can still trust. Those are the hand tool skills in a power tool world. They’re not going anywhere. Loads of shit has changed, but stories still have all their guts and they’re still a conduit for the human experience to connect to each other.

If there’s one last fortress where my confidence lives, it’s there. I am good at this part of the job. I like this part of the job. I am already at that destination.

Where the ground starts getting fragile and motile is when it comes to all the steps that happen post-writing and editing. When all the drafting is said and done, I am a man lost in the desert with an empty canteen. If it were ten to fifteen years ago, I’d be on the cutting edge of marketing strategies. Hell, if it were five years ago, I could still keep up. But somehow I fell the fuck off the marketing strategy radar and I know fuck-all about it. So let’s take it off the destination list. I never really liked it anyway, and no one ever hired me for it.

When the ground gets unstable, when you're not sure what to do or where to go, the next step needs doing. It might look like masturbating, putting on some music, craving a smoke and thinking about vampires, but it's at least something. You’re not going to get where you want to go without movement, and sometimes that movement looks a lot like not doing shit you don’t like even when the world makes it seem like you gotta do it and love it.

You’re blindfolded and throwing darts in a hurricane

For all of Candy’s salespersonship, she doesn’t know with any certainty what’s going to happen next. You might buy her bullshit, she might spend that money on some kind of organic produce, you might struggle writing your first five chapters for the next three years while she explores juice cleanses and TikTok trends. But she’s gotta play the expert and convince you that you gotta play the sap.

The truth is we’re all totally uncertain all the time and the ground is always unstable. We don’t know what’s coming next, and committing to something is a risk. Risks aren’t bad, though Candy’s eager to keep you scared and buying her fixes to avoid risks otherwise she’s out on her ass and risking some shit of her own.

I got up this morning and didn’t know what the fuck to do. I chose action over frustration and grabbed one of the bajillion things I could do and tried to get something done. When it didn’t blow up in my face, I kept throwing darts in the hurricane until I got somewhere I could see that I had accomplished something for the day.

Trudging alone and getting stuff done isn’t always glamorous. You can’t fill an Instagram reel with aggravated faces made while typing and staring at the ceiling thinking. The work we do, the art we make, it’s not always the prettiest efforts. Chef’s Table on Netflix this isn’t. This is the mad scientist lab, the grimy hood garage and chop shop, the warehouse hideout for the heist team. It’s a mess and we sit here in our mess and we get our guts on the page until the art shows up.

Sometimes you have to be your own cheerleader and your own significant other, checking on yourself to keep going. Everyone needs help, even from yourself.

So ask for help. For the love of Wu-Tang, ask for help when you get tired of the blindfold and the wind in your face and the darts going all over the place.

The ground is always going to be unstable, and help should help you get where you want to be and doing what you want to be doing.

I can help. I want to help. Ask me how in the comments.