How do you write without being stopped by fear? What is the number one thing you need to do in order to believe in yourself as a writer? Beyond confidence, it’s having faith in yourself. It’s trusting that you can produce the work you’re afraid of creating.
When I was 16, I was writing poetry like it was no big deal. For days, even weeks on end, I would write poetry seamlessly, treasuring every word I wrote and being so proud of it. However, at some point, I stopped doing that. At 20, I was not writing a single thing for fear of it not being “good” enough. I got stuck. For years, I endured a long, wintery writer’s block, not knowing what my true purpose for writing was.
When I forced myself to write even when I didn’t feel like it, that’s when things shifted for me. The more I wrote – whether it was blog posts for my blog or poetry for myself – the more I trusted myself. It was this key I never knew I had, an awakening that set me free.
When I turned 23, I opened the doors to the key I was holding and finally found my purpose: putting out work that I’m proud of, creating something I’m proud of, and only releasing it if I think someone will benefit from or become inspired by it. When I forced myself to write even if I didn’t like what I was creating, it became easier and easier to cling to what my soul wanted to say rather than what I thought it had to say. That’s the difference: to write for yourself rather than for others. It made me more in tune with my creativity, it made me who I am, and it made me accept my writer’s mind more. I sat and just wrote stories. Some I posted online and some I didn’t. I wrote like it was nobody’s business but mine.
When writing poetry, I use the stream-of-consciousness form because I find that really helps when it comes to creating intuitively and in the end, I’m proud of whatever I produce. Journaling as well, which is a form of writing that allows you to document your emotions, thoughts and experiences, helps when it comes to figuring out what you’re feeling and what you want to write about. When I’m journaling, sometimes I get an idea when expressing a thought or emotion and that usually inspires a poem or story. Journaling, or writing poetry, in the stream-of-consciousness form is personally my favorite thing because when you write with it, you’re not thinking about the form or structure of your work, you’re simply producing whatever comes to mind.
When it comes down to it, you’re stuck, just write. Use prompts that guide you, ask fellow writers on what helps get their creative juices flowing, and most of all, be you. Be proud because that story came from you. You’ll be unstoppable. And eventually, you’ll find that story you want to write.