Photo by Tom Hermans on Unsplash

Completing my work placement was one of the things I had been the most excited about when starting my postgrad since I had never had a chance to in undergrad. So here I was with an unpublished manuscript in my hands and I felt like I was in MI5. For days I would pour over my manuscript alone in my room just bursting with ideas that I knew I didn’t have the savvy to execute in time. Thus, my paralysis towards the written word begins. 

It was a challenge to balance my rapidly approaching deadlines with this shiny new task that I had full control over and a much shorter time frame to get everything done. That wasn’t what scared me though. I found that while I was working through my assigned tasks the pressure was far greater and I often found myself too nervous to even scroll through my manuscript. The last time I felt like this was the Magazine Challenge run by the International Magazine Centre in January when I became the opposite and obsessed over every detail just so I wouldn’t let anyone down. It wasn’t like my coursework where if I messed up it would just reflect badly on me, but this? I had been trusted with a manuscript that so much time and care had been poured into and here it was in my shaking hands. It wasn’t until week three of my placement that I was reminded by a quote by Joan Didion, my idol, that I took a step back and looked at what I was doing.

“Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the spectre of something as small, as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question.”

Was that what I was doing? Being so paralysed by my own expectations that I was unable to push forward and do the job that I knew was capable of executing? I can do it. I could do it. I had been working on marketing plans and designing book covers and looking at texts since September. Why did I suddenly forget everything I was capable of? Is that really how I’m going to spend my career in publishing by just putting everything off because I’m too worried about messing up leading to me getting more worried about missing my deadlines? I knew I had to do something to get myself out of this stupor before I let my placement and myself down. 


By week four of my placement it was done. I had done it. The work was done and I had received feedback for it. The world hadn’t crumbled around me because of a colour palette I had chosen or an idea for a marketing plan. I took the feedback without bursting into tears (something I’ve always been neurotically scared of) and explained my rationale for my design choices. It was fine. We often think about authors like Capote and Lebowitz with their decades long writer’s block but is publisher’s block a thing? If it is, I was suffering from it. The best advice I can give someone in my position is to just…get over yourself! It’ll be fine in the end!

References:
Joan Didion, 1961. On Self Respect. Vogue. Available at: https://www.vogue.com/article/joan-didion-self-respect-essay-1961