Don’t Give In to These 6 Writing Doubts

“A word after a word after a word is power.”

― Margaret Atwood

There’s power in the written word, but if you’re early in your journey, it’s hard to believe. If you write and write but no one seems to read, it’s hard to keep your confidence. You might even start to lose sight of what makes writing so wonderful and just how much power you have in your hands as a writer.

Very few people become smashingly successful, New York Times bestselling authors overnight. There might be one or two bizarre, fast success stories out there, but the vast majority of writers need to work hard for years before achieving significant recognition. It’s an uphill climb and it can be difficult not to fall into self-doubt.

Don’t doubt your value.

This is one of the biggest mistakes I personally made as a young writer. I started freelancing very young, took any project I could get, and ultimately ended up working for a fraction of minimum wage most of the time. There were commissions I took where I made only cents per hour. But I was writing, so I told myself that it was fine.

It wasn’t. Don’t fall into this trap — don’t doubt the value of your work. Working hours for pennies is not the most constructive use of your time. Most people who want you to work for almost no compensation aren’t the kind of clients you want to write for. Bizarrely, you’re better off volunteering for a large organization that working for cents per hour for an individual or small group.

Keep learning and improving — but don’t doubt your work. Writers deserve to be compensated.

Don’t doubt the power of a good editor.

“A good editor is someone who cares a little less about the author’s needs than the reader’s.”

― Dene October

This quote may not give you, the writer, a warm and fuzzy feeling. However, it is important. You are writing for your reader. Having a good editor in your back corner can help you focus on the reader when you slip into focusing a little too much on your agenda as a writer.

Being a writer is a tricky thing; you desperately need to have balance. In one sense, you don’t want to doubt your value. You do need confidence. You just can’t have that confidence turn into arrogance.

We all need editors. You might be both a writer and an editor, but you still need another human being who is also an editor to look at your work. In the end, it’ll make your writing stronger and it’ll help you find where you need to improve as a writer. Writing is a skill that can always evolve to higher levels, no matter how many years you’ve been writing for.

Know that every type of writing requires a unique skill set — don’t give up before you try.

I recently started doing some freelance technical writing. Even though I have the nuts and bolts of grammar down pat and know a fair amount of different writing techniques, I was a little lost at first. In the past, I’ve done medical writing, marketing writing, blogging, and of course, creative writing.

Yet even with all that experience, technical writing was a very different beast for me. It took me a bit of time to really get used to reading long sentences filled with a lot of jargon that I just needed to Google and teach to myself to fully understand.

The point of this doubt is to not give up too soon.

Don’t fall into the trap of feeling unpublishable.

“Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of job: It’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins.”

— Neil Gaiman

As rejections roll in, it’s easy to fall into a crisis of faith. The temptation to slip into despair is strong. The worst part about it is that it’s an entirely subconscious temptation — you don’t want to give up, but the disappointment, fear, and insecurity take root and grow into a dreadful growth of self-doubt.

This is where showing yourself a bit of tough love is important. Keep working to learn more about writing and improve your craft. Keep trying to improve, but know that your writing has worth. Don’t let anyone or any large stack of rejections trick you into thinking that you’re unpublishable. We writers say this a lot, but even massively successful writers like J.K. Rowling received endless rejections before getting something to stick. This is a time where logic can be your friend; we all get tons of rejections, but that doesn’t mean we’re unpublishable.

Don’t believe people when they say writing is a worthless skill.

In that same vein of grappling with feeling valid as a writer, there are going to be naysayers who underestimate the value of writing as a skill. Professionally speaking, it wasn’t easy for me to start getting writing jobs.

Yet once I broke into the world of marketing writing, it wasn’t very hard for me to get other writing jobs. It’s a delightful snowball effect and it does get easier to find work as a writer.

Writing is never a “worthless skill,” as some might have you believe.

I have an argument I always pose with people when they say that writing or communications degrees aren’t very marketable.

It may not be as easy to get a job as a degree in technology or finance, but writing is still something that everyone needs to do at some point. Even that person with a very marketable finance degree is going to need to write a decent cover letter to get themselves a job.

However you apply your writing — whether it’s marketing, technical, medical, or creative — it’s a creative muscle.

You’ve got to exercise that muscle and develop it. It feels good to exercise the writing muscle when you're done with a writing session. Whether you’re a blogger or a copyeditor, keep practicing and keep writing.

The more you work at something, the more you can be sure of yourself and your skills. With the right balance of persistence and a desire to improve yourself, it’s entirely possible to dispel these common doubts about being a writer.