What’s the book you’ve been sitting on? The idea that won’t let you alone? The one you secretly hope to get to…someday?

Friend, can I challenge you? It’s time to write that book.

Oh, I know the objections. You’ve heard that you should always write in the same genre. Don’t deviate. I get that. I’ve followed the rule. I see the value in growing your current audience, enhancing your skill, actually selling books. I know writing outside of your genre means some of your audience might not follow you. You might have to start over a little. Friend, can I challenge you? Maybe it’s time to write it anyway.

Or maybe what’s stopping you is less of the unknown and more of the unfamiliar. Maybe you are struggling with how to find just the right words or fully describe the scene in your head. You’ve tried and failed to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, but the words just don’t seem to flow right.

Or maybe you are just stuck worrying what people will think. What if people hate your story? Or maybe it won’t sell well. Maybe you are interpreting your creative genius wrong, and this story is meant to only exist in your head.

Friend, can I challenge you again? The world needs the story you are nervous to write. And you aren’t alone. I’m preaching to the choir here.

In YouVersion’s reading plan “C.S. Lewis and the Call to Create” by Jordan Raynor, I found a convicting tale from C.S. Lewis himself: “All my seven Narnian books began with seeing pictures in my head. [The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe] began with a picture of a Faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself: ‘Let’s try to make a story about it.’ At first I had very little idea how the story would go. But then suddenly Aslan came bounding into it…once He was there He pulled the whole story together.”

Planning, plotting, dreaming, and scheming are all valuable components of writing. But I would argue the most challenging piece of all is being faithful, diligent, and disciplined enough to sit down and write when the idea feels stirring and scary all at once.

I’ll say it again: the world needs the story you are nervous to write. The one that exists in your deepest dreams for your writing journey. What is your “Faun carrying an umbrella” scene? Go write it. Today. Let it be messy. Let it be scary. But let it be. Bring it to life. You never know who is waiting to read the story you are scared to write.

So I’m taking my own advice and am off to write about a blonde wearing a coffee-stained pencil skirt who just broke her heel walking in the cobbled streets of New York City. It just started raining and…we will see where her soggy self ends up.

I believe in you, friend. You’ve got this.