Trusting yourself as a writer

A post at Helping Writers Become Authors: How to Trust Yourself as a Writer (Not Relying on Advice Too Much)

You can trust your own instincts, says this post: What is story? Story is just a reflection back to us of our arcs of psychological transformation. It’s a mirror of life. This means that, inherently, story is something every human has an innate understanding of. Nobody has to tell you what a story is. You know deep in your heart and your gut. You know what a story is—particularly if you’re drawn to writing a story. You’re probably deeply immersed in fiction yourself. You watch movies. You read books. You learn by osmosis what stories look like on a more intricate level. You come to the act of writing with an innate knowledge. It’s important to recognize that. 

I agree, and this is slightly funny, because a moment earlier in this post, the author says You don’t just do it instinctively. Yes, you do; or at least, I do; and also, the author of this post agrees with me that you do, actually, do this instinctively. But then she goes on with this rather long post. I like the length. I don’t like facile, shallow posts, which are everywhere. I like longer posts like this one, especially if they stick to the point and don’t drift off on some other topic partway through. This post does stick to this question: How can you trust yourself as a writer and not rely too much on advice?

If that need to know is arising out of a sense that, “There’s some things not working in my story and I’m not able to execute something the way I want to,” then that lets you start working on better and better questions. That will help you find the answers you need instead of it taking this shotgun approach where you feel like you need to know everything.

This seems like good advice to me. You may not be able to get helpful answers to your questions, but I think it does help to think about what is actually not working, even if you can only narrow it down to “the ending doesn’t feel like it’s working, but I don’t know why” or something like that. I mean, that’s still broad, but it’s not that broad.

Just because somebody is out there telling you how to write a story doesn’t mean that they know what they’re talking about. And it certainly doesn’t mean that even if they’re right in some contexts, they’re right in all contexts because art is extremely varied. Again, you might be creating something that’s never been created before, and others can’t necessarily comment on that. … Now, obviously there’s also the other side of that where artists think they’re creating something massive and original, but really it’s just a mess. So again, you have to find that balance of humility and curiosity,

Also good. Just a good post overall. I don’t remember looking at this website before, but I’ll come back to it now and then after seeing this post.

Please Feel Free to Share:

The post Trusting yourself as a writer appeared first on Rachel Neumeier.