What's Holding You Back?

How are you doing with meeting your writing goals?

Have you given any thought to what’s holding you back from accomplishing as much as you’d like?

One word: fear.

Fear of failure, or even worse, a fear of success, often holds writers back from accomplishing as much as they’d like. It can be absolutely paralyzing, and hold many of us back from even getting started. There’s that pesky “inner critic” in our heads that tells us our stuff is garbage, we’ll never amount to anything, and we should just give up the dream and try something else for awhile. It’s also fear that stalls projects all the time; we get overwhelmed by what the characters should do next, or we think that no editor will ever be interested in that article or this manuscript, so we stop in midstream and the project lies there, abandoned.
So how do we conquer that fear of failure? Think of how much worse we’d feel if we never tried writing at all. We owe it to ourselves to at least power through a first draft. No book that has ever been on the shelves started out as the version we see; chances are they’ve gone through many, many revisions until the story was told as well as it could be. We never lose that inner critic completely—the secret is to ignore him and focus instead on the work in front of you.

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Kudos to BDWN member Richard Clark, whose book The Wreck of the Red Arrow has earned some nice publicity! Read the full article from Friday’s REPUBLICAN Herald here.