Feel Like You Are Failing As A Writer? — Lower Your Expectations
Creativity thrives in an atmosphere of acceptance. Lower your expectations and give yourself the freedom to explore uncharted territories in your writing.
Upcoming episode on Becoming A Writer podcast this Saturday — we are going to talk about how deliberately practicing your writing will improve your skills.
Creativity thrives in an atmosphere of acceptance. Lower your expectations and give yourself the freedom to explore uncharted territories in your writing.
- Julia Cameron
I, one hundred per cent, felt like a failure when, just after four months of posting videos on my YouTube channel, I decided to shut it down.
When I started my YouTube page in late 2019, I was nervous and excited. I thought this would be it — I’d finally find the break I was looking for in my content creation journey.
I thought that posting videos about self-help ideas would work. Everyone’s watching self-help content, right? So they’d watch mine, too. Nope, I was wrong.
I didn’t get the break I hoped for. Instead, I got my morale broken.
While my writing and my message were good enough as a new YouTuber, where I lacked was my delivery. It was simply terrible. You could see how nervous and sweaty I was as I rushed parroting the script. I was trying too hard to be fun and likeable, and this put-on attitude was making me look fake.
Also, the whole process of making one video for the week was excruciating, agonising and extremely painful. (Yes, I used more than one synonym to express the pain because that’s how bad I felt.) When starting on this YouTube journey I had forgotten to take into account that I am a beginner in every step of the process. I was writing, producing, directing, acting, handling the camera, editing, and marketing the whole thing alone and had no idea how to go about it. And the lack of feedback was making it harder for me to understand if my channel was working or not.
After four months, I accepted that this YouTube thing was too hard for me at the moment. I wasn’t ready for it, and I wasn’t ready to pay the price it was asking of me.
I was falling short of my vision for my YouTube channel because both my standards and expectations were high.
Having a standard to look up can be a great motivator and barometer for our work. It’s the high expectations that result in our downfall. While I started right by aiming high, I should have also started humbly. I should have understood that while it’s exciting to start a YouTube channel and exciting to think about all the doors it can open for me, I should have remembered that I was a beginner who needed to learn the craft first.
Expecting too much too soon from my YouTube channel resulted in me quitting and feeling like a failure. Thankfully, I learnt my lesson and didn’t repeat the mistake when, about six months later, I started my Medium and Substack pages.
Why Should You Lower Your Expectations With Your Writing?
It makes it easier to get started. With expectations comes perfectionism, and with perfectionism comes procrastination because you won’t start writing until you know what you are going to write is going to be perfect. What we need to realise is that we become near-perfect with practice, and that happens when we get started with a writing project. We need to get our hands dirty with our writing projects and we could do that by telling ourselves, “Let’s see what happens.” That’s the only expectation we should have of our writing.
It results in you showing up consistently. When your expectations are in alignment with your present situation, instead of getting anxious and skipping your writing session, you get excited about it and skip your way to your desk. Show up for your writer self enough consistently, and you will start believing in your writer self.
Lower expectations also mean lower stress. You are not trying to write the next best-seller. You are simply telling yourself the story or idea that’s brewing inside of you. When the unnecessary weight and pressure of writing something perfect and amazing falls off your shoulders, you are able to ground yourself in your creativity and write freely.
It also helps you build your writer self. Bringing your expectations from sky-high to your present place gives you the space to evolve as a writer. You get into the habit of writing consistently. That leads to the momentum you need to let your writing flow. This leads to an increase in creativity as you allow yourself to explore. With each session, you increase your endurance and confidence in yourself to stay in the game for the long run and not burn out. And when moments of stumble occur, you are resilient enough to bounce back again.
This, ultimately, makes you fall in love with the writing process. Now, the fun is not in the finished essay or book but in the writing itself.
How To Make Sure You Have The Right Amount Expectations With Your Writing?
Open your eyes and be honest with yourself about where you are in your writing journey. The situation I fell into with my YouTube channel was completely avoidable if I had been honest with myself and where I stood. Knowing in theory what a creative journey entails doesn’t mean you will ace it practically. If you have never written a book, essay or poem before, accept that you don’t know what is going to happen. In reality, in this phase, you don’t even know what you don’t know. It’s only when you put in the action that you find out all the spaces in your creative self that need work. So, when starting with your writing projects, keep the bar low and give yourself ample time to finish it. Accept where you and your skills stand and work in favour of them. That’s how you compound your growth.
Be realistically ambitious. We think that we humans are rational. The truth is we are emotional beings, and therefore we like it or not, we are a bit touchy. So when starting on your writing journey, you keep, let’s say, “finishing a book in 3 months,” as your goal and then you fail, you are bound to feel hurt. It’s natural to feel disappointment, even anger. But the unseen negative impact this has on us is the lowering of our self-esteem. Fail to reach the humongous finish line again and again, and you start to devalue yourself and your potential. What we don’t realise is that there is nothing wrong with us or our potential as a writer. The mistake we are making here is going straight for the medal marathon run instead of training ourselves to win the race. To train yourself to become the writer you dream of being, keep the finish line closer. Aim to, following the same example, finish one chapter every two days. Or go even closer — write for 30 minutes each day after dinner. Let yourself win small wins regularly, and before you know it, you’ll be crossing the celebratory finish line.
Focus on writing rather than having written. As a new writer, I never understood the phrase “focus on the process, not the end product.” But once I, for a change, kept the end I was aiming for aside and brought my attention to my act of writing, I finally understood it. The joy, effort, pleasure, satisfaction and results are in the act of writing. Having a finished book in your hand is the inevitable conclusion to the act. Don’t worry about finishing the book; find comfort in writing, and the book will complete itself.
Embrace your writing journey, both the highs and lows. Musician Marc Anthony once said, “If you do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” That is true, but some more explanation is needed. Doing the work you love is the best feeling to have. But that doesn’t mean you will love every aspect of it or will love the job every day. Some days, your writing session will feel lousy. Some days, you’ll feel like your writing is on fire. You may enjoy the writing aspect of your job but hate the editing bit. You also may love talking about your writing but hate marketing yourself as a writer. I love it when I am writing my essays and stories, and I loathe the time I have to spend tackling the business side of my craft. Just like you love your best friend, who is both an adorable and a stupid being, you need to embrace your writing journey with all its highs and lows. You have to accept it unconditionally and then figure out a way to make it work for both of you. Your love for your writing should be stronger than your irritation with the not-so-fun side of writing.
Forget about others. I have noticed that out of all the creative careers out there, writers burden themselves most with what the market wants. This is an unfortunate place to be in. The best form of art happens when you express yourself to the best of your capabilities and the fullest in that given time of your life. When we start thinking about what others want to read or what our family and friends will think of our work, we tarnish our creativity. It’s best for us to learn to find satisfaction and validation in our writing instead of waiting for others’ permission to feel so.
Give yourself and your writing space to grow. As you are in the process of being the writer you are, don’t be too strict with yourself. This is something we are taught as children in school and at home — that being strict results in obedient humans. Our elders had to be strict with us because they were on a deadline to get things daily to keep life, at home and school, moving. But life is rarely orderly. Life moves in phases and cycles. And being humble and flexible is the key to flow with life. The same goes with you and your writing. Yes, have goals and ambitions for yourself. But instead of ordering yourself into submission, coax yourself into action. Instead of saying, “I have to write 1500 words today, or I have failed,” go for, “I know today was not a fun day, and I am tired. But I will still show up for my writing and write as much as I can and not judge myself for the quantity or quality of my work today.” Do this, and you will make far better progress in your writing projects while also becoming your writer self’s best friend.
Think of your writing journey as a train ride instead of a flight. There is no denying the fact that train journeys are more fun than plane rides. With a train ride, you get to enjoy the scenery and watch as the world as you know it changes to something you are seeing for the first time. The different stations you reach give you a glimpse of the people and lifestyles that are similar to you but are also quite different and surprising to you. And the passengers travelling with you in your coach all carry different stories and dreams and heartbreaks that are left to your imagination. When it comes to a flight, you sit in a cramped position with no legroom, and you start from your place and, a few hours later, drop in another. You didn’t get to feel and experience the transition happen. The plane may make you reach your destination quicker, but a train ride makes you feel that you have arrived. Same will happen to your writing journey if you think of it this way.
