Think of all the new things you’ve tried in your life. Never mind when you were a kid, and everything was new. Think of all the new things you tried as a teenager or young adult. I started working with horses when I was seventeen. Holy cow was everything hard. I’d been obsessed with and reading about horses since I was just a kid, but all that technical knowledge didn’t translate as smoothly to application as I thought.

Anyone with a modicum of humility knows there are millions of things we don’t know. When I was learning to ride, there were so many times when people would ask me ‘Do you know how to…?’ and I had to admit that no, I didn’t know how to do even the simplest of tasks. I struggled with a lot of embarrassment about this for a while, as ten- and eleven-year-old children had to school me on basic information.

On the contrary, writing has been a mainly solitary endeavor. Nobody has to know what I don’t know. I’ve read books and articles. Watched tutorials. Gone to conferences. But any opportunity for learning always started in the same place: acknowledging that there was something I didn’t know. I realized I wanted more techniques under my belt for revision and self-editing. I discovered Revision and Self-Editing by James Scott Bell. I devoured the book and then jumped into editing. While I continued studying revision methods, I wasted no time applying what I learned as I learned it.

I acknowledged quickly and mostly with humility that I was going to have to learn on the fly, and that I was going to have to do things even when I had no idea how to do them. The first time I wrote a query letter, it was a disaster. I still sent that thing off to an editor and actually got a full manuscript request. I earned a little confidence, and I kept writing queries, oftentimes for books that didn’t exist and which I had no intention of writing, simply for the practice.

There’s a certain joyful abandon in trying things you know good and well that you don’t know how to do, but only as long as you are willing to admit you’re clueless and that it might be a dumpster fire. The lack of pretense is freeing if you let it be.

Unfortunately, we won’t always have access to top-notch information and/or mentors and instructors. Sometimes, we have very little scaffolding to help us on our journey to learning new things. Don’t be scared. Do it anyway. Or be scared… and do it anyway. You’ll be amazed at what you learn.