In Writing--Faith Over Fear

 

 

Writers make mistakes as they move along their writing journey. None of us are totally immune to doing something we wished we hadn't in our writing life. 

Sometimes we hurry the process, and it shows. We don't present our best work when we move too quickly. Maybe we toss something in we think is correct but hadn't taken time to do a little checking or research. We could get called on it by a reader. We might grab a title quickly out of the air only to think of a much better one when it's too late. 

These are only a few of the mistakes we make. The more often that an error comes up, the more we fear moving on, or even trying to do so. This is when we need to give ourselves a pep talk. It's when we need to encourage faith in our own abilities. We need to put faith over fear. 

One of the best ways I know to increase your faith in yourself and decrease your fears in your writing life is to make two lists. List A should be made of all the things you fear about writing. In List B, show the pluses in your writing life, the good things that have happened, and what you feel are your strengths as a writer. On which list should you concentrate? That's a no-brainer question. 

We need to pump up our own confidence level and we should do it on a daily basis. Maybe then, we can start believing in ourselves. If you dwell daily on your mistakes and your fears about writing, what do you think will happen? Yes, you'll start convincing yourself that you cannot write well, that all you do is flub up. 

Learn to have faith in yourself. If you don't have it, no one else will have faith in you either. Editors and readers figure it out fairly easily when you write without confidence in what you can produce.

Let's go back to those lists. I said to concentrate on List B, but you might also want to go through the first list and address those fears, one by one. Ask yourself if the fear is justified or are you responsible for creating your own fear? If the fear is justified, what can you do about it? How can you change whatever that fear happens to be? 

Work at having faith over fear, and you'll be both a happier writer and a better one.