Jul 2021
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Jul 2021
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NinaWrites
Jul '21

I been getting these weird feelings for a while.

I enjoy writing and reading - and have been working on writing for personal reasons for a while.

I'm currently drafting a story and I feel this weird paralysis that my writing isn't up to par or that it's unoriginal, boring, a waste of time.

I am aware of the typical responses for people who suffers from demotovation/writers block. After all, I say this to myself on a daily.

"You should write for yourself"

"If you don't like to write, then maybe it's not for you."

"Maybe your heart isn't in it."

Etc.

I took a long break, and got back to it this year. But I guess, I'm wondering if anyone has something new to offer? I want to write, I want to share my stories, but why do I get this weird paralysis of not wanting to share my work? Maybe I'm scared that no one will read it and my greatest fear would come true - that my writing isn't up to par. I guess - it all comes down to a lack of self confidence.

If anyone has any advice/suggestions on how they overcome self-sabotaging one's confidence, I'm all ears! :slight_smile:

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Kuma
Jul '21

I gave this advice to others with the same issue.

A couple of years back I had a really bad knee injury, I even got surgery. The doctor said I might not recover full mobility of my knee. In fact I haven't regained full mobility. But I still wanted to practice Pro-Wrestling. So I had to change my focus, change my style and learn new tricks.

I realized that I couldn't keep growing vertically, so I decided to grow laterally. Maybe that's what you need. Test out different mediums for your writing, try new stuff, even if it fails the experience will remain with you. Everyone is the worst critic of their own work. I'm publishing a novel here and I'm constantly anxious thinking if I'm doing the right thing in each chapter.

Managing that anxiety isn't just helpful for writing, but also for your everyday life. Failing is a fear we all share. Learning how to deal with each failure and learn from it is imperative if you want to write.

The novel I'm writing has been in development for around 10 years and I have rewritten full sections over the years. The fact your worry about the quality of your writing means you care about it. But sometimes you need to let go and jump to the deep end of the pool if you want to swim.

Ordinaryaverageguy
Jul '21

I don't know if I can explain "why" but I can say that the same sort of demotivated spells wash over me, too. It helps that every once in a long while, someone says something that lets me know I reached them at some emotional level. I hope you're getting something like that once in a while. I know that I write a lot of the time because I want the attention of someone reading my scribbles. But I also know sometimes the reason I write is an emotional kick - when I cry onto my keyboard for something that was sad or achingly wholesome to me. And if it can still jerk my heartstrings to read a year later, I guess it might be passable prose. The jury is still out, though.

cherrystark
Jul '21

Are you excited about your idea? I learned this through trial and error. I think that no matter your writing style, if you are excited about your work, it becomes 10x easier to keep writing. If your excitement fades, hold onto your story. You never know when the muse will come back.

Regarding your lack of self-confidence, there really isn't a perfect solution for this. The only thought that came to mind is "Forget yourself and go to work." If you turn your focus to other things that will build you up, you'll forgot about the things that are holding you back. You are capable of telling a good story. It just takes time to write it.

DiegoPalacios
Jul '21

Here are some tricks i use when i feel blocked....

1-taking a rest to clear my mind.....

2-listening to music that set you in the mood for the scene you need to write or that fits the tone of your story...

3-research related to my project

Hope this helps!

yumeryuu
Jul '21

After my daughter was born, I had a writing hiatus of about 2 1/2 years. That is a LONG TIME if you are a writer.

I had the idea. I had the plot. The characters. Everything in my head. But I was just... flat.

And honestly there was only one cure.

Sitting down and forcing it out of me. As painful as it was. The hours of nothing coming out. The hours of erasing and editing. I knew that if I didn't do something, that inactivity would just continue.

DesiredUsernameTaken
Jul '21

Criticism is hard to take. Everyone will tell you it's something you have to accept, and welcome when you write stories, when in reality it's not. Time and time again, books that are by most standards considered horribly written in every aspect, make it to the big shelves and propel the writer to the top of the charts. Stories that are considered well-written don't make it often as people think they do.

We tend to assume for some odd reason that if you didn't make it, you weren't good enough. That's BS. There's been a couple authors who try to replicate their insane success by writing under a pen name, only to find that, despite having written the same quality work--and in some cases, even better quality work--they fade into obscurity even though they're published. Until someone discovers their pen name is connected to that one big writer. Long story short, quality doesn't matter much as people think it does with writing, and therefore criticism loses some of its assumed necessity.

So, accepting and absorbing criticism is not a be-all-end-all for writers. Still, if you want to share on the web, where a lot of people are far more cruel than they need to be, it's important to work up a resistance. Writing is very personal to me in most cases; when I share my stories, you're getting sneak peaks of some aspect of how my mind actually works, and how my characters reflect pieces of me and fight against each other. I don't adhere to many writing conventions; some of them, I take as a guide, but by no means are they rules. Storytelling to me is a creative experience that refuses to obey rules.

For a number of my stories, I write for me and only me. For other stories, I write for both me, and a hypothetical audience I hope to one day have, because I believe storytelling is one of the most powerful devices we can use to reach others. It's my way of connecting to the world, and to people, and communicating, as someone who's very quiet in real life. Given how much work I put into my stories, if I were to encounter brutal feedback that people so often love to give for their own amusement, I know I'd take it hard, so I make little steps for myself.

To do this, I'd make a short story, or some longer-term project of mine that I don't really care about. Maybe it's a comedy, or it's satire. One story I was working on was about a girl who makes badly-written romance on the Internet, with a huge following. She offends one of her superfans by killing off a favorite of theirs, and then is cursed to live in her own fictional world, where she figures out the super attractive dudes she writes about are the worst people she's ever met! Ridiculous premise, but it was fun, while not meaning anything to me, so I knew I could take any feedback on it. No one actually gave me feedback on it because that's hard to find on the Internet but...the step I took still stands.

Another step you can take, is to find someone who you know is a gentle critic. This does not mean a critic who sugarcoats. This is a critic who is completely honest, but phrases their criticism with language that's easier to digest. These people can be hard to find, as it takes a bit longer to write a nicer take on criticism than not. It takes more words, and you have to think about how you're phrasing it. A sub-step to this option is to ask them to pick out only 1 thing they would change, as opposed to maybe the 3 or 8 things they found.

Take criticism at your own pace to slowly open yourself up. You don't have to put your work out there for the entire web to see. Find some people who know how to provide gentle criticism, let them know what you want from them, and preferably find some way to return the favor. :slight_smile: