In the interests of full disclosure I nearly gave up on this podcast. Sarah and her ghostly adventures almost didn’t see the light of day from the Dropbox hole they occupied. I’d written 7 scripts, this website was being built, I was working on the logo, banners, etc, then after a string of bad recordings I just sort of fizzed out.
I’d always had doubts, as any creative person does, of whether the story was good enough, whether my acting skills (or lack of) was of a suitable standard. And let me tell you, making a podcast isn’t cheap, even if you do it yourself. I just kind of…lost my energy and enthusiasm.
The hurdle that I couldn’t jump over was, of course, the recording. I know, sounds simple: plug mic into computer, record, done. I did that hundreds of times with just the first 3 episodes, and every time there was something wrong. Too much echo, too much background noise, my voice had this weird vibration to it, there was always something wrong. Now, I’m not a professional, I don’t have a sound booth or access to a recording studio, so I had to improvise. But whatever I tried never worked, and it wore me down until eventually I stopped…and took a step back.
Let me tell you it was the best thing I could’ve done. The saying “it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon” came to mind. I had to pace myself, this wasn’t going to be done overnight. Something you love doing can quickly become something you hate when the pressure is on, except that the only pressure that was on me was internal.
I took a week or two (maybe more) and worked on other creative things. Then one day I found myself drifting back to the podcast and to the recordings. I listened to one of the earlier ones and couldn’t understand what I’d thought was wrong with it. So I set about adding effects, the intro and outro, and just like that I had the first episode all ready to go.
The moral is that it’s alright to take a step back, to take a break from the sprint towards the finishing line. It may just be all you need to succeed.