I’ve been talking the last few weeks about getting started and the fear of failure, quoting one of my recent reads, Start More Than You Can Finish: A Creative Permission Slip to Unleash Your Best Ideas by Becky Blades. Blades describes the creative process as an amalgam of imagine-think-decide-act, not necessarily in that order. (My words; forgive me, Becky, if I’ve mangled your premise.) I had just committed — to myself — to writing a short story, knowing only the theme of the target anthology, the word limit, and where I wanted to set it when I read this:

“Deciding to create a thing we’ve imagined is more complicated than choosing between two things. It’s placing a bet on our future selves to make future choices[;] to balance facts and feelings with yet-to-be-known risks and rewards.”

Yes, yes, yes. Experience can give us a sense what ideas will pan out, even if we don’t know how they will play out. As we take bigger risks — what if my commitment had been to a novel, not a short story? — we’re making a bigger bet and may not have that sense. .

Take the bet.