Stuff I've Learned: Trust Yourself

One of my clearest childhood memories is of playing school with one of my babysitters.  I wrote a poem -- a beautiful poem, I thought, about summer and gardens and roses and... okay I don't actually remember what it was about but my memory says it was brilliant.  I painstakingly decorated the page with climbing roses and presented it to my babysitter.

She took it, read it, and used red pen to change the first letter of every line to a capital letter because, she said, every line in a poem has to start with a capital letter.  I was crushed.  And infuriated, since even then I knew she was TOTALLY WRONG.

Stuff I've Learned: Trust Yourself

You have to trust that you know what you're doing (even if you don't).  You have to believe in your vision, in your talent, in your skills, and in your own unique voice. 

Thanks to all the books you've read, you already have an innate grasp on dialogue, pacing, characters, and story.  Thanks to all the years you've lived, you've already developed your own worldview and preferences and opinions, even if you haven't consciously articulated them.  You are already a special snowflake.  Trust that.  Trust yourself.

Except when you're wrong.  But that's what revision is for.

One of the hardest things to do when you sit down to write is to take that leap of faith that it will all be okay.  Especially when there are people telling you that it won't be okay, you won't make it, you can't do it, you're not good enough, you're not smart enough or funny enough or whatever enough.  Especially when the person telling you all that crap is yourself.

But it will be okay.  You will figure out the ending and the main character's motivations and that funky little bit of pacing in the middle and the voice for that secondary character and what happens in that part of the outline where you wrote "something cool happens next."

Or maybe you won't and then you'll go on to write another story that's even better.  And that's okay too.  You can still trust that if you write enough and read enough and live enough, you will get better.

And you don't need to capitalize the lines in that poem.