Just Do It!

Yeah! Easy for the NIKE marketing team to say. On September 1st of last year, I began writing my first novel. Up until then, I had only written a few articles for my high school newspaper, a handful of poems, a couple of short stories, and a zillion journal entries in countless, five-subject notebooks. It was a long-time dream of mine to write a full-length novel, but something kept holding me back. That something was self doubt. After all, I had no formal training in the craft other than the couple of writing courses required for my business degree. I was already short enough on time without adding writing something of that magnitude to my schedule. And, I had all kinds of ideas floating around in my head but no clue how to turn them into a full-length novel. Suddenly, though, these characters appeared in my thoughts, and they wouldn't go away. They kept getting bigger and bigger until they were the only things I could think of. Finally, I couldn't take it anymore, and I gave in. I did exactly what the characters, and NIKE, had been urging me to do for over a decade--JUST DO IT! And, it was the best decision I've ever made. What about you? What pushed you into writing that first novel?