Marry Your "Mr. Good Enough" Writing
Finding motivation and confidence in your writing.
Who needs a motivation and confidence hit?
Me! Me! Me!
That’s most of us most of the time, right?
Us writers are notoriously unconfident in our abilities.
Like nervous daters, always worried our kissing skills aren’t quite up to scratch.
Writing (like kissing, I guess) is something you NEVER master. Not really.
Yes—you could be better.
Yes—someone else is better.
Yes—you could write more often, more beautifully, more clearly, more expressively, more more more….
But thinking like that doesn’t encourage us to do better.
It’s DE-motivating.
If you want to get motivated with writing you’ve got to do one thing:
Lower your standards with Mr. Good Enough.
I don’t mean publish low-standard work. You don’t commit to the first guy/girl you find in the pub. Well, sometimes you do…but
how about instead, get fun and flirty with a bad draft.
Get nose-to-nose with what one of our wonderful BYW family members calls DIRTY DRAFTS.
A dirty draft is a first draft that needs a ton of cleaning up later on.
Time for some literary mud-wrestling. You can pull out the editing mop later!
Perfectionism and comparison steals our confidence and motivation.
You can be serious about your writing and still have fun with it.
Try:
free writing first thing every morning. Don’t worry about whether it’s “good” or not.
writing in a different genre than you usually do. Try a lyric essay, a short story, or research a topic you’ve never written about before.
using a template and see what it inspires.
P.S. The Meaningful and Timely Personal Essays Course begins March and runs for 6-weeks. 3 spots only. This is a very special course and doesn’t run often. Find the details here.