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. 

Writing and Fear

In his sermon Sunday, our pastor posed the question: What are you afraid of? As we drove home, it occurred to me that we writers live with a lot of fear. Not a fear involving danger of any kind but fear that we often create ourself, something dangerous only to us. Why do we do that? And what kind of fears do we deal with?

We fear:

• Submitting our work
• Rejection
• Public speaking (book signings and speeches to literary groups)
• Writer's Block
• Finding new ideas
• Writing crummy stuff that everyone will hate
• Success

There are others but this list covers some of the main ones. What do you do to overcome these fears? 

Learn to have faith in yourself. Easy huh? No, it's not. You have to work at it. Concentrate on the positives in your writing journey instead of dwelling on the negatives. Make being positive a habit. Believe me, there are many who make the black cloud hanging over their head a habit. If they can do that, you can certainly do the exact opposite. Will it happen in a day? No. Little by little.

Consider this--if you don't believe in yourself, can you expect others to believe in your writing?

I had some dates to put on my September and October calendar this afternoon. As I was turning the pages, I noted a saying at the top of each page. Curious, I checked all of them and I found four that spoke to me as a writer. Maybe they will reach out and touch you, too. Take a look. Which one do you like best, or relate to the most? 

Progress always involves risk; you can't steal second base and keep your foot on first.

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.

If you don't paddle your own canoe, you don't move.

Hope is the dream of the waking man.