Friday, May 3, 2013

Ignore doubts: keep writing every day

By Dennis Mellersh

As you continue to learn about how to write a book, and you put in the time to practice your writing (hopefully every day) there are times when you may become discouraged.

One of the reasons this may happen is that as you progress in your writing efforts, you will be continually developing your imagination and your creative way of looking at the world around you and interpreting it.

You already had a strong imagination before you started on your writing journey or you would not have had the intellectual creativity to want to write a book.

But, one of the downsides for people who are creative and have strong imaginations, such as you have, is that they may also have a tendency to imagine the worst as well as the best. However, such thinking is all part of becoming a writer, and having the imagination of a writer. Self-doubts about writing can affect even the most experienced writers.

Thoughts that your writing is not good enough; that no-one will care about what you have to say; that you will never meet your own high writing standards; that some days you are blocked and have great difficulty writing…the list of imagined or anticipated difficulties goes on.

If you are feeling like this, some words from Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain during the Second World War can offer some encouragement:

“You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination, not much can be done. Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist; certainly many more than will happen; but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination.”

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