Low Writing Confidence and Ways to Shift Your Mindset
Struggling with writing confidence? You’re not alone. Lots of writers, including myself, experience self-doubt. At its worst, it induces a kind of creative paralysis—which usually devolves into a seemingly endless shame spiral. You feel bad about yourself, which makes it hard to believe you have anything worth writing. But not writing makes you feel bad about yourself, because that book inside you isn’t going to write itself...and on into infinity.
But you can break out of that shame spiral! Let’s look at some factors that may impact your writing confidence, and some suggested mindset shifts to help you work around the self-doubt.
Low writing confidence strikes again!
CAUSES OF LOW WRITING CONFIDENCE AND WAYS TO SHIFT YOUR MINDSET
CAUSE: The more you know…
When I started creative writing, my only training was years of voracious reading, so I wrote instinctively. It’s like learning to play an instrument by ear—you can’t read music and maybe you don’t know the terminology, but you feel your way through. So I wrote “by ear” for the first year or so, not knowing what I didn’t know.
Then I started to learn more about the craft of writing—the rules for writing plot, character, theme. And once I learned the rules, they dammed up the free flow of words that gushed out when I started. It’s harder to get a chapter, a scene, a sentence on the page when you’re constantly thinking, “Is this telling?” or “Don’t use clichés” or “The road to hell is paved with adverbs.” (Thanks, Stephen King.) Weirdly, knowing more about the craft took my writing confidence down several pegs. All those words that’d flowed freely when I was a clueless idiot suddenly seemed awful—overwritten. Potholes in my story logic. Flat characters.
MINDSET SHIFT
"I learned to write by writing." —Neil Gaiman
For me, this creates analysis paralysis—or good ol’ fashioned overthinking. How do we ditch this mindset so we can continue clicking away at our computers?
To start, I recommend checking out this 2019 article from Psychology Today. There’s a helpful overview of analysis paralysis, as well as some strategies for coping with it. As with anything, a huge part of coping is simply identifying the problem so you’re able to recognize when it’s kicking in.
One strategy spoke to me personally, as a lifelong perfectionist and control freak: “Practice being less than perfect.”
Give yourself permission to write imperfectly. Even seasoned multi-published authors (who presumably know all the rules) probably write crappy first drafts. Just get something—anything—on the page. You can always go back and revise and edit. But I can assure you that actually finishing something will boost your writing confidence. You did A Thing! Maybe it’s not perfect, but you completed a task that many, many people wouldn’t even attempt. Give yourself a pat on the back, but remember—keep writing. The more you exercise what you’ve learned, the more ingrained it’ll become. Eventually, it’ll become a kind of muscle memory and the impulse to evaluate every sentence against writing rules will fade.
CAUSE: Mental health and self-perception
Since I’m not a medical professional, I’ll just speak to my own experiences with mental health and writing. Without going into the charming details, suffice it to say that my brain is broken and it lies to me on a pretty regular basis. This impacts my writing in two significant ways:
It can be hard to dredge up the energy and motivation to write;
Since my lying brain causes me to have low self-confidence in general, it’s difficult to have any kind of real writing confidence.
Point 1 is a blog post in and of itself. As for point 2, it’s hard for me to believe that I have any real talent, or that I have anything rattling around in the ol’ attic that’s worth saying.
That’s when I have to remind myself that my brain is a sneaky liar, and two can play at this game. Writing is too important to me just to give in and give up. You want to trick me? I’ll trick you right back! (HA! Gotcha, brain!)
MINDSET SHIFT
“Every time I get scared or feel like I'm not going to be good enough at something, I say that mantra to myself. ‘Pretend you're good at it.’" — Jenny Lawson
Here are three things that help me trick my brain into having writing confidence.
I follow other creators who are amazing, but struggle with writing confidence and/or self-doubt. If they can keep creating despite their broken brains, then DAMMIT, so can I. I recommend following Jenny Lawson, a writer who chronicles having depression and anxiety in a hilarious way.
I spend time with people who help me feel good about myself—people who:
- Laugh at my jokes;
- Tolerate my nostalgia for the nineties;
- Love Scrabble as much as I do.
These wonderful people remind me that I’m lovable, which boosts my self-confidence. And when I’m feeling more self-confident, my writing confidence improves.I’ll go back and read something I’ve written that I’m proud of. This reminds me that I’m capable of stringing together a coherent sentence, and if I did it before, I can do it again.
CAUSE: COMPARISON TO OTHER WRITERS
Whenever I read a gorgeously written book, it’s easy to get sucked into the aforementioned shame spiral. It’s a real bummer, because I need to read like I need to eat, breathe, and sleep. It’s how I process the world, and it helps me become a better person. Sometimes I wish I could just read a book for the pure enjoyment of it, but I’m afraid those days are gone. Don’t get me wrong—I still love to read more than anything. But as a writer, I’m also looking at everything from a technical standpoint. And if my abilities don’t measure up to the quality that’s in the book I’m holding, it can be discouraging. It makes me feel like the bar to achieve publication is impossibly high, and I’ll never be able to vault over it.
MINDSET SHIFT
“You fail only if you stop writing.” — Ray Bradbury
I try to remember why I became a writer in the first place.
One of my projects has been organizing a binder full of my elementary school writing. Every piece is cringe-y in some way, for sure—but I also see a young person who loved to write. I’ve always had that feeling of words swelling up inside me, needing to find their way onto the page. And when you’re able to accurately translate a complex thought or feeling into words—that’s some magic pixie dust, right there.
Do I want to achieve publication? Sure. It would be awesome to earn some kind of income from writing. But even if I’m never traditionally published, I get something out of writing. I write to process the world around me; to tell myself the things I need to hear.
If I hold that sentiment close, then it doesn’t matter how my writing stacks up to someone else’s. Remember what you love about writing, and make it your goal to strive towards that magic pixie dust feeling. Nothing else matters.
CAUSE: AM I REALLY MEANT TO BE A WRITER IF I FEEL SO BURNED OUT ON WRITING?
You have this dream to write a book, but getting words on the page is about as easy as squeezing water out of a brick. If you were meant to be a writer, wouldn’t the words flow freely? Wouldn’t you feel compelled to write every free moment in your day, rather than having to bribe and cajole yourself to sit down at the page? If this is your mindset—that natural-born writers contain a sweetly flowing river of words they can just tap into—then of course you’ll lose writing confidence! This is such an easy trap to fall into. I’ve fallen into it, many times. I think, “If I’m meant to be a writer, shouldn’t I need to write like I need to breathe? So why am I watching my fifth episode of Unsolved Mysteries today instead of working on my book?!” I’ve literally considered rearranging my sock drawer as a way to avoid writing, but I haven’t done it...yet.
I know I’m not the only one—I see you there, scrolling on Instagram! I see you looking up the number of teeth cats have, because it became weirdly urgent that you possess this knowledge...or maybe that was me again.
MINDSET SHIFT
“Anyone who says writing is easy isn’t doing it right.” — Amy Joy
I came across this quote recently, and it so succinctly speaks to a fundamental truth about writing.
It’s not supposed to be easy.
Even Neil Gaiman says, "This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until it's done. It's that easy, and that hard."
Even NEIL GAIMAN says it’s hard!
He also says it’s “easy”, but I think he’s getting at the fact that it looks deceptively easy. The reality is very different. It’s hard, which means it’s okay to get burned out. It doesn’t make you any less of a writer; it makes you human.
Take a step back and do something else. There are lots of ways you can gather writing experience and material without actually sitting down at the page. READ. Check out a writing webinar. Listen to a writing podcast. Write postcards to your friends. Even something as simple as observing the world around you can provide material for when you do feel like sitting down at the page again.
The flipside, though, is that when you get back to writing, you have to be willing to sit with the uncomfortable feelings that come with doing a Hard Thing. You’re going to want to get up and do the dishes or fold the laundry or scroll on Instagram. Fight the urge to give up when things get hard and push through the discomfort. The more you do it, the easier it’ll become.
THE FALLACY OF EVERLASTING CHANGE
At the beginning of this piece, I used the phrase “suggested mindset shifts to help you work around the self-doubt.” Work around was a very deliberate word choice, because self-doubt in writing will likely plague you, in some form or another, for as long as you’re a writer. It’s pernicious, and it’s not something you can blast through and be done with.
There’s so much media out there—books, movies, TV shows—presenting the narrative that growth is a constant upward trajectory. Once a character has attained a certain bit of wisdom, once they’ve learned a particular lesson, that’s it—the Thing they were battling isn’t a problem anymore. They’ve learned their lesson, cast off those chains, and now they’ll continue livin’ life as a new and improved version of themselves.
But the reality is as at odds with this narrative, and that dissonance can make us feel bad about ourselves—especially writers, who are famously self-critical. Just remember that the REAL key is developing strategies that allow you to write around your insecurities; finding sneaky little side-roads that skirt around that mountain of self-doubt. Your progress will have peaks and valleys, but you’ll be moving in the right direction.
Do you have strategies for boosting your writing confidence? Let us know in the comments!
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