Overcoming Fear in Writing: A Personal Journey to Becoming an Accomplished Author
From a fear-writing person (since childhood) to an accomplished author and top technical writer in software testing: a transformative journey.
A repost of my past article on Medium
This article deviates quite a bit from my usual topics: Test Automation and Continuous Testing. I think it’s still related. Below is from Rework, a best-selling software development book.
The authors explained that quite clearly and used the word “crucial”. In this article, I share my personal journey of overcoming the fear-writing.
A few months ago, I flew back to my hometown and shared a 2.5-month time with my parents. Nearly every morning, I woke up early and wrote something on my MacBook. This daily routine of mine surprised my parents greatly, despite their awareness of my previous book publications. From their memory, Zhimin was a boy deeply afraid of writing.
Indeed, I consistently received poor academic results on writing-related exams. The feeling of “I suck at writing” accompanied me since primary school in China, all the way through completing my master’s degree studies in Australia. In other words, I was terrible at writing, regardless of language. Upon the acceptance of my master’s thesis, a sense of relief washed over me, marked by the thought, “I am now free from the obligation to write, not any more.”
At work, I managed to avoid any tasks that involved writing. Now, looking back, I missed many good opportunities.
As of today, I have authored 12 technical books and was rated a top writer in Software Testing on the Medium platform (over 150 of my articles were featured in leading software testing newsletters). Yes, people pay to read my writings. I earned some passive income from writing, the activity that I feared for many years. What changed?
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