There’s a saying that everyone has a novel inside them. I think it doesn’t necessarily have to be a novel, but the sentiment is probably true and that even the most unlikely people have a lot of creativity inside them that they can’t get out. Everyone has something. A lot of people secretly work on little personal projects or just daydream about working on little projects but everyone has these little ideas that they want to get out.

The problem that most people have and that I definitely have is getting them out in the open. There’s a fear that you’ll personally sabotage your own project and it’ll come out greatly diminished from what you expected. I think the trick is to realise that whatever you do, it won’t come out like you imagined it and that you should just go for it anyway.

People don’t really mean what they think they do when they talk about writer’s block. Writer’s block isn’t a complete lack of ideas, it’s a fear that the ideas won’t be very good, or realised properly. Everyone has ideas, it’s just getting them out of your head and into a physical form that’s the challenge.

It doesn’t really matter if what you do is rubbish as there are strong chances that someone out there will like it, even if it is due to a complete and utter lack of taste. I used to check a blog that utterly panned bad webcomics, but the comics weren’t all that bad, and they had some fairly solid readerships. It even goes beyond “but it’s just a matter of opinion” into the realms of “it doesn’t matter about the opinion”. It doesn’t matter if what you’ve produced is rubbish. By all means try and improve, and listening to and adapting to criticism is a good thing, but producing rubbish is the only way you get better. Just on the subject of webcomics, almost every single long running comic you look at will have a massive gulf of quality between their first current strips. This is because they ran with the stuff they thought wouldn’t work well and improved from there.

You have to create the rubbish first. It also doesn’t matter if you think you’re going to ruin your good idea that you have inside you. Chances are you’ll have better in the future, and you can always revise what you’ve already done later. If you have ever formulated an independent thought, you’ll be capable of doing it again.

The saying that everyone has a novel inside them is wrong. To put it more accurately, everyone has at least one novel in them at any given time.