How to Build Confidence in Your Writing Ability

Welcome, Fantasy Nerds! In the past we have mentioned that in order to succeed in your writing, you need to have confidence in yourself. So how do you build that confidence in your writing abilities? We’re here to share with you our path to believing in ourselves. It is something we are always working to improve, but that we both feel we have made significant progress on lately.

Take the First Step

The first step that you make in your writing has to be a little bit of a leap of faith. The key to taking this leap is avoiding “rearview mirror syndrome”. This is a concept I learned about in “The Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod. “Rearview Mirror Syndrome” is basically limiting your belief in what you are capable of to what you have accomplished, or failed to accomplish, in the past. For example, believing you can’t establish a daily writing routine because your attempts at this have failed in the past. 

You’ve got to decide to believe that you can achieve something new. You have to take that first leap of faith to prove to yourself that you can do something that you’ve never done before. After that, it gets progressively easier to believe in your ability to do new things. 

Start Small

Start small to build up your confidence. It’s hard to maintain faith that you can finish a novel, if you haven’t finished a writing project in the past. When I first started writing, I wanted to write a novel, and I thought I should put all my effort into that. I didn’t want to write short stories. I finally decided to write one to submit, so that I could build up my writing credentials. 

What I didn’t realize was that finishing a short story would be the confidence boost I needed to get back into working on my novel. For the first time, I had finished something. Not only that, but it was good enough to be published! 

Remind Yourself That You Are Capable

Once you take your first small step, you no longer need pure faith in your abilities; you have evidence! Every time you want to try something new or scary, you just have to remind yourself of all the new things you have done that you weren’t sure if you could do. If you could do those things, why can’t you do this now? 

Keep track of the new things you succeed at, so you can look at the list whenever you feel doubt. Here is the journal that I use to keep track of my writing accomplishments. Make sure to write down all your accomplishments, big or small. 

Build on Your Progress

Make sure you use each success to fuel another attempt, maybe even to give you the push you need to try something bigger! If you can finish a short story, why can’t you finish a novel? If you submitted a short story to a journal, why can’t you submit one to a contest? If you’ve published a story, why can’t you start a blog? 

Most of what stops us from trying new things is fear of the unknown. Once you have done something once, it will be so much easier to repeat the process. Likely, once you submit one story, you will find yourself submitting them left and right. If you compare new challenges to something you have already tried, it will be less scary. 

Don’t Give Up

It’s important not to lose momentum. You don’t want to give yourself time to doubt. The first thing I do when I get a rejection is to submit again somewhere else, or with another story. This way I’m not dwelling on the rejection, and I have something to hope for. Tell yourself that you did it, you submitted something! And you also got rejected and it wasn’t the end of the world; you can handle it! Then re-read your successes journal and keep going! Don’t let the fear of failure hold you back, it’s just a lesson to learn and an advantage you can take to improve!

What Do You Think?

How do you build up your writing confidence? Do you have any new ideas to share with us? If you found this post helpful, we would love for you to leave a comment, or even buy us a cup of coffee! We promise to share! 

Thanks so much for reading!

Clever & WTF