Stop questioning yourself as a writer
“Be hard on your sentences, be hard on your paragraphs, be ceaseless and unrelenting in your revisions, but stop questioning your ability to be a writer. Let go of that worry and focus on how strong a writer you can become.”
- Dinty W. Moore, Crafting the Personal Essay
Keywords:
Curiosity is the single most important attribute with which humans are born. Curiosity is a powerful tool, like a scalpel or a searchlight. It is a way to affect change -- even to initiate global change -- on a personal level.”
—Loren's introduction to Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues
About Loren
For 10 years, I edited the nonfiction magazine Morbid Curiosity. Scribner published Morbid Curiosity Cures the Blues in 2009. Now I'm blogging about graveyards as travel destinations at Cemetery Travel (http://cemeterytravel.com). A collection of my cemetery...
Connections
Causes Loren Rhoads Supports
Clarion Write-a-Thon
Nanowrimo
Loren’s Favorite Books
Tinker at Pilgrim Creek, A Natural History of the Senses, How We Die, Something Wicked This Way Comes, American Gods, The Bloody Chamber, Owls Hoot in the...
Loren is a fan of
re: I do not question my ability as a writer
When the source questions itself, it is in crisis. Every effort will be second guessed and that will be a waste of oneself.
When the source does the will of its inspiration based on learning and talent, it is creating a pattern of logic and value out of disparate parts. That is a writer who has faith on oneself.
Exactly
I think that's exactly what he's saying: improve your skills and trust your inspiration.
Redundant, but . . .
stop questioning your ability to be a writer.
That made me stop short. I wonder how much time I waste and how many steps backward I take doing just that.
I must start my next effort by giving myself a positive point of view as to how it will turn out. Actually, I'm currently avoiding a project because "it won't turn out that well." Time to take positive action.
Thanks for the thought, Loren
My pleasure, Dolores!
If something I post inspires someone else to write, that would be the best thing in the world.
Loren