I don’t know what I’m doing. Do you ever feel that way?

Even regarding something you’re passionate about, proficient in, perhaps professional at? Even if it is something within the very core of your identity, do you still feel unsure and ignorant?

Writers encounter this often. From what I understand, this impression never goes away, and it never fully should. When you experience a prolonged sense of confidence and security in your writing endeavors, you are most likely playing it too safe, and you may even be in denial.

You are most likely playing it too safe.

Every now and then it is important and healthy to sense that surge of God-like power in your work. To be so sure that you are on the right track, bursting to write the next line, knowing you are penning literary genius. (These thoughts are often misguided, but they’re motivating and fun, so no harm done as long as you become a little more realistic in the editing process.)

The problem I speak of comes from being comfortable. We as writers should not be comfortable. We aren’t chair designers. We aren’t bed-testers. We are comfort-givers, like triage doctors. Our job is hard, scary, humbling, and insatiable. The need never ends, not the personal drive to write, and not the benevolent need to put into words the thing that no one has yet put into words — the thing that needs to be put into words, because my heart cries out for it, and it is a crying which will not be soothed until I read those improbable words.

We as writers should not be comfortable.

We should not be comfortable. We should be terrified, on a roller coaster of risk and grand gestures that will most likely fall flat. We should be elated with hubris, typing words as if they are strobes of lightning. We should be certain we will fail, certain we will dominate, bullied by our own fear into a cave of writer’s block that lasts years, and then betting everything on our unlikely success. That betting should look like plodding away on the keys with discipline, receiving feedback with the skin of a rhinoceros, and attempting publishing like the terminally insane.

Do not write what is easy. Write what is hard.

How long have you avoided your keyboard, kidding yourself that you have good reason? Why have you not exposed your vulnerability, your darkest self, your wildest dreams, the foibles of your closest allies, in your writing? Do not write what is easy. Write what is hard. Write the hardest thing you can possibly bring yourself to write. That might be your blackest memory, or it might be the joy-filled novel you’ve dreamed about but haven’t finished. It is our fear of failure which keeps us from success, and as writers, it is our fear of self which keeps us from writing well, or even writing at all.

It is our fear of self which keeps us from writing well.

Sit down whether you know what to write or not. Ponder your writing as if it is a problem you must solve today. Be okay with being ignorant, a novice, a fool. Wander into territory you’ve left uncharted. That’s where all the good treasure is. ❖

Elizabeth Abram

Writing coach at Everlasting Writing

www.EverlastingWriting.com