When I was in secondary school, our form tutor made us do an exercise where we had to stand in front of the class and speak for five minutes straight, on a topic assigned on the spot, without ever saying ‘Um…’
If you said um at any point, any point at all, you had to start over.
Four minutes and fifty-nine seconds in, and an ‘Ummm…’ slips out at the end? Man, that’s a shame.
Start over, bitch.
It sounds like one of those cruel and unusual punishments you’d get from a private school in Oxford or something, but honestly, once you accepted it, you learned how to beat it.
Embrace the awkward pauses.
Not too long so that she’d tell you to start again. But enough time for you to think of what you’d say next without uUuMm blurting out.
You had to stand in front of thirty other teenagers, and let every sentence hang. Embarrass yourself, and leave out the fluff.
I’ll ram in a janky comparison to writing now.
Don’t water your work down. If you want to reach the end goal, to write something people will love reading, you need to accept momentary embarrassment.
The amount of people I know who want to be writers, but won’t let their parents read what they write (or friends, or colleagues, or, sometimes, literally anyone at all) is insane.
And look, I get it – it feels weird letting someone listen to your steamy romance scenes, or read your fucked-up blood-orgies. But if you want to be a writer, you need to let it happen.
Embrace the embarrassment.
And never, ever, water-down a story you want to tell. Who cares if people think you’re a horny psychopath?
Keep those uncomfortable, embarrassing scenes.
They’re the ones people will remember.
Would Fifty Shades of Grey have been so popular if E.L. James just put stuff like ‘and then he spent the night… The next morning, I-’
No. No, it wouldn’t.
If you want a true lesson in not holding back, I’d suggest reading either Dead Inside by Chandler Morrison, or Cows by Matthew Stokoe. Read both if you like. They're pretty short, but boy-oh-boy do they have impact.
(I’m not usually one to give warnings about content, but for those two, just… be prepared. Seriously.)
Failing those, try the short story Guts, by Chuck Palahniuk. When he read that out to crowds, people would literally faint on the spot. Did he blush, and water the story down to make it more palatable?
Absolutely not. He was delighted.
If you want to be a writer, you need to embarrass yourself.
Or else, you’ll need to start again.