I spent years not creating because my English wasn’t good enough.
Years. Like, actual years where I had an idea, opened my phone to start, and then closed it because I thought: “people will laugh at my grammar. I’m from Romania. I don’t write like a native speaker. Why would anyone listen to me?”
So I didn’t post. I didn’t start. I watched other people build communities and make money and I just… waited for my English to magically improve.
I was that person. And now I’m so much more than that.
Create, even if it’s bad in the beginning
Three years of opportunities. Three years of a community I could have been building. Three years where, if I’d just started despite the fear, I’d be somewhere completely different right now.
My first Instagram post about books was genuinely bad. The captions were messy. The photos were chaotic (literally just books and my cats stacked randomly together). The grammar was definitely off. For three months, nothing happened. I didn’t grow. Nobody engaged. But I kept posting anyway, because at that point I had already wasted three years waiting, and I wasn’t about to waste more.
And then something shifted.
Not because my English got perfect. It didn’t. Not because my captions became polished. They didn’t. Something shifted because I stopped trying to sound like something I’m not, and just started sounding like me.
Which is to say: messier. More run-on sentences. More “honestly” and “lol.” More grammar mistakes. More of the way I specifically think as a Romanian person who reads in a second language.
Turns out that’s exactly what people wanted.
I’m doing the exact same thing right now with my Substack, except this time I’m at least aware of it.
I’ve been thinking: “I don’t know how to write stories yet. I only know how to write tutorials. Maybe I shouldn’t write stories. Maybe I should wait until I’m better at storytelling. Maybe I should stick to what I know.”
And then I remembered: I said the exact same thing about Instagram. About digital products. About every single thing I’ve built so far.
I waited for permission. I waited to be “good enough.” And it cost me years.
So here’s what I’m doing instead: I’m going to write stories even though I’m not a “storyteller” yet. I’m going to share things even though I don’t know if they’ll land. I’m going to be bad at it in the beginning. And I’m going to do it anyway.
What actually helped me improve my English (and just start creating)
If your English (or whatever your “I’m not good enough yet” excuse is) feels like the wall standing between you and posting, here’s what worked for me. None of these are fancy. All of them compound over time.
- Watch everything in English with English subtitles. Not your native language subtitles. English audio + English subtitles means you start seeing how spoken sentences are actually written down. That gap closes fast.
- Read all your books in English. It was painfully slow at the start, especially because I was reading mostly fantasy and half the vocabulary doesn’t exist in normal life. But now it feels completely natural.
- Write by hand every morning. Three pages of pen-and-paper journaling about anything that’s in my head. Not for anyone to read. Just to practice thinking in English without an editor watching.
- Script everything. My YouTube videos, my voiceover reels, my captions. I write it down first, edit it, and then create. Scripting takes the pressure off having to “perform” in real time.
The actual structure I use when I create carousels
Most of my posts perform well on Instagram, and it almost entirely comes down to storytelling. If people feel seen, if they relate to you, they’re way more likely to engage with your content. Pretty photos don’t beat that. Trends don’t beat that. Storytelling beats everything.
Here’s the exact structure I use every single time.
Step 1: Write your thesis first
One sentence that captures the entire point of whatever you’re making. Before you write a caption, before you plan a reel, you need to answer this: if someone only took away one thing from this post, what is it?
For a post about building a reading habit, the thesis might be: it’s not about discipline, it’s about making it impossible to forget.
Everything else in the post supports that one sentence. If it doesn’t support it, cut it.
Step 2: Don’t edit while you write. Dump everything first.
There’s a technique called spiral writing, and the whole idea is simple: write without caring. No deleting. No re-reading. No fixing the wording mid-sentence. You just dump every single thought onto the page until you run out.
When you try to write and edit at the same time, your inner critic shows up and kills every idea before it has a chance to become something.
Get it all out first. Edit later.
Step 3: Organize into three chapters (the 3 C’s)
Once you have your messy draft, structure it into three parts. I call them the three C’s.
Context. Set the scene. Where are you? What’s happening? Give your audience just enough to understand what’s going on, but not so much that they tap away before the story even starts.
Conflict. This is the BUT. What went wrong? What’s the tension? What problem are you in the middle of? This is the part that makes people keep reading, because conflict is interesting and summaries are not. Nobody saves a post that says “here are some tips.” They save the post that starts with “I was doing everything right and nothing was working.”
Conclusion. What shifted? What did you learn? What’s the THEREFORE? This is where you land the thesis. You planted it at the beginning. Now you bring it home.
And then, the step everyone skips: get to the point. Cut anything that doesn’t serve the thesis. Readers feel it when a post is tight and they feel it when it’s padded. So does the algorithm, honestly.
Structure isn’t a creative limitation. It’s what makes creating feel less chaotic.
I use this framework for every caption, every carousel, every reel script. And once it clicks, you stop staring at the blank page. You just open the doc, write the thesis, dump everything out, and organize it into three parts. Every. Single. Time.
If you want my FREE storytelling guide for creating bookstagram posts, you can grab it here: Free storytelling guide →
Final thoughts
If you’ve been waiting for your writing to be “good enough” before you start, this is your permission slip to stop waiting.
Your first posts will be bad. That’s not a worst-case scenario, that’s the actual job description of starting. Everyone’s first posts are bad, including the creators you currently look up to. They just kept going long enough that the bad ones got buried under the good ones.
The thesis of this entire article is honestly just this: the version of you who waits to be ready will never start. The version of you who starts before being ready will figure it out on the way.
I wasted three years. Don’t waste yours.
Thanks for reading. Kisses ❤️