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Building Confidence to Reach Your Writing Goals
Five tips to help you with your confidence issues
The longer I write and teach, the more I’m convinced that poor writing has nothing to do with writing skills — those can be corrected quickly and easily — and everything to do with a lack of confidence.
Writing seems like such an easy activity. We let our thoughts flow, type words on the screen, and before too long, we have an article, a blog, a short story, an essay, or maybe even a chapter of a book.
Then, when we reread what we wrote, we realize how terrible it is. The characters seem trite, the story does not flow, and the article or blog feels like a carbon copy of every other writing on that topic. We close our eyes, drop our heads back in disappointment, and tell ourselves we are terrible writers.
Or we never get to that point at all and promise ourselves we will write someday. Maybe we even believe it.
Why is this? A big reason is a lack of confidence. Lack of confidence shows up looking like we are not enough. The story is not good enough. The blog is not interesting enough. Our ideas are not unique enough. We simply are not enough.
There in front of us is a finished piece of writing, but we cringe and tell ourselves that no one will ever see it.
