I’ve received many emails, letters, and even a few postcards, expressing the same thing: “I want to be a writer.”
Many of the senders go on to ask the inevitable question: “Am I good enough?”
I’m glad they asked. After all, if we’re honest, you and me, we’ve been there at some time or another, too, wondering the same question writers have been wondering for centuries…
Note: This is a guest post by Claire De Boer, she is a certified Journal Instructor and teaches online workshops at www.thegiftofwriting.com. Download her free eBook, “Soul Writing,” and follow her on Twitter @ClaireJDeBoer. Claire’s passion is to help writers come to a new place of awareness and personal growth through writing their own stories.
These days everyone’s talking about writing your story. Not just any old story, but the story of your life, the road map that got you to where you are today. For most of us that’s a pretty daunting thought. I mean, why would anyone be interested in hearing our story anyway?
I’ve been stuck lately. Way stuck. Lost in the Amazon jungle, stuck. And that’s stuck, my friends. If you need to use the word stuck five or six times within your first few sentences, then that’s, well, pretty stuck.
I hate to admit it, but I’ve been without a fresh idea to write about for months. But that’s all changed, because I’ve rediscovered a well kept secret.
Can you remember the last time you were in the presence of a true storyteller? When we run into those people, at parties or as neighbors or in the next aisle over in the grocery store, we feel it. There’s a kind of magic in the way they set the stage for their yarn, color their characters, feed us details.
Last year I ran a contest about becoming a writer. I asked people to write their story about the moment when they knew they were a writer. The stories came in like a flood. It was amazing. The stories were motivating and inspiring.
But this year, I want you to take it one step further…
Everyone has a story to tell, including you.
The dangerous part of writing and sharing our stories isn’t always the writing itself or even the story, it’s more about how it may affect others, and how they might react to it. It’s dangerous, because honesty always is.
I’m pleased to announce that my new book Writer’s Doubt is now available on Amazon in Kindle format!
Whewwww! That was a long needed sigh of relief and of accomplishment. Writer’s Doubt has been in the works for almost 4 years and I’m delighted to have it finished, but in some ways it’s also a feeling of loss because I no longer get to open the latest draft and continue working on it. It’s finished. It’s not just mine anymore, now it’s yours, too.
There were times when I thought I’d never finish it, much less publish it. I did both. I overcame doubt, and so can you!
Writing’s easy; editing’s hard. Getting lost in the fun and the discovery of putting down words can make up for the times when the words don’t come easily. But it’s during the editing process that you’re forced to look at the flaws in your creation.
How could that possibly be any fun?
You are enough. You are in a position right now to be enough. Not next week, not tomorrow, not later today, not in an hour, not in a minute, right now. Right here in what we might call the eternal present you can choose to accept that you are enough. By making this decision you accept the freedom and responsibility to do the great work you’re here to do.
As writers it is important that we acknowledge this so that we can create without pressure (the future) and live without fear or regret (the past).
When I was in my early twenties and an up and coming pool player I thought in order to be the best, I needed to know everything about billiards. I thought I needed to know how the tables were made, what the balls were made of, and even the ins and outs of cue design.
Then, one day, while in the pool room sitting in a lounge chair “reading” a book on how to make billiard tables, my mentor tapped me on the shoulder and snapped me out of a daydream. Truth was, I had drifted off because the book was boring and I wasn’t really interested in building tables. “Why are you reading that?” He asked, and I told him. What he said next was life-changing.