“Always lying and always full of shit”

Before (And After) Writing Great Emails, You Also Have To Write Bad Ones

Sometimes after a truly excellent email, subscribers reply to tell me it was the best thing I’ve written all year.

That happened last week.

(The newsletter was about selling in 2024 vs selling in 2020, in case you need a refresher. Even the world’s most amazing emails still have a very short shelf life.)

Many of you quoted back your favourite parts, the ultimate compliment that is every writer’s love language. To everyone who replied “Thank you, Daddy,” what can I say?

You are the most and the best.

Daddy likes 

Naturally my inner critic took this wonderful feedback and transposed it into a brutal chorus of negativity.

Nowhere left to go but down.
This week’s email is bound to be a disappointment.
You’re travelling so you won’t have time to write something good.
Ditto for next week, which will be even worse.

Blah blah blah.

You know the refrain.

Steven Pressfield wrote in The War of Art, “Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”

Fortunately and also unfortunately, I write for a living so I have no choice but to put on some Taylor Swift to drown out the noise of resistance, and keep going. That’s how writing works. You keep going even knowing the next thing you write might not meet the standard of the last thing you wrote.

It might be better, it might be worse. It’s always a risk.

But you keep going, marvelling all the while at how your most brilliant creations live in the same neighbourhood as the flaming dumpster fires you wouldn’t even recycle for fear someone might find them and read them and know that you are as ugly on the inside as the unforgivably bad poetry you were so bold as put on the page.

I’m being dramatic.

But sometimes that’s what it feels like.

Today I just wanted to tell you that I feel that too. Yes, me. A professional writer who has written the newsletter equivalent of eight books, one per year for the last eight years.

All writers feel resistance.

We keep writing anyway.

In case you needed one, this is your permission slip to write bad poetry. Brainstorm thirty terrible headlines. Outline a slutty book about vampires who fall in love only to find out they’re brother and sister. (I’ll never forgive you, Cassandra Clare!)

All great works are preceded by bad ones.

The trick is just to keep practising.

For the one hundred thousandth time, thank you for being a reader of both my bad emails and good ones, for sticking around as I fumble around for brilliance, and letting me know on the days I strike gold. 

(But dear Lord if you unsubscribe from this one I may actually die.)

XOT

Trazam Kalryzian [she/they] Did someone forward you this email? ​Subscribe here​. Follow me on ​LinkedIn​.