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Ask me a thing

I was just wondering if that, before you became a writer or even during, where you ever struck with utter lack of confidence in your work? That you felt you couldn't write or what you produced would never be good and thus you were never good at writing? If so, what did you do to remedy that?

Yep, all the time.

In fact, I am answering your question instead of writing, because I feel that way right at this moment.

Usually, what I do is this:

I get a cup of coffee. I drink that cup of coffee. In fact, I drink the hell out of that cup of coffee.

I read a book that’s better than mine.

I whine. I fidget. I look at the internet.

And then I fix the story I am working on to the best of my abilities.

A lot of times we see what’s wrong with our work. And it makes us upset and insecure and sometimes devastated. And we’re generally right — when we think something sucks, there’s probably something wrong with it. But unless we know it sucks, we can’t make it better.

And one part, one story, one thing doesn’t make us good or not good writers. It’s always the story that isn’t good … yet. And its our job to engooden it.

That can take hours or days or years. (It took me a lot of years with my first novel.) But an instinct toward knowing when something isn’t good is the most helpful tool in your arsenal; cultivate it, just don’t let it mean anything about you as a person or a writer.