6 ways to build your writing confidence

As promised earlier in the week, today our topic is confidence. In particular, how can you build your writing confidence? From time to time, we all doubt our ability to write and are worried that what we do isn’t good enough, but learning to believe in ourselves and our writing is a hugely important lesson – not least for independent publishers. So with this in mind, here are 6 ideas for building your writing confidence…

Practice makes perfect

It’s a rare writer who writes perfectly from the very beginning. The art of writing is something that we learn over time, and there is always something new to learn. So keep writing. If you believe in yourself enough to keep going even when you doubt yourself, you’re already halfway there.

Writing is subjective

Remember that much of writing is quite subjective. Just because one person doesn’t like what you’ve written, it doesn’t mean it isn’t good – it just means their tastes are different. Your audience is out there.

Show it to people

This is probably one of the scariest things for any writer: showing your work to someone else. However, it’s a very useful thing to do, and you do get used to doing it over time. Give your work to someone you trust; even if you’re not asking them for feedback, just the act of getting someone to read it can be very valuable and is a big step – especially when you’ve only ever written for yourself. Then, over time, your confidence will grow and you’ll be able to show your work to more people and improve your writing as a result.

Read more

One of the best ways to learn about writing is to read more. And the more you know, the more you will have to draw on in your own writing, which is a great confidence boost. So read, and then read some more.

Take your time

Learn how to improve your own work, whether it’s by improving your grammar or learning how to tell when a different word might be more appropriate than the one you first chose. Take your time to perfect things so you can be confident in what you have written. The process of editing gives us confidence that we’re improving what we first wrote, which in turn gives us confidence in our writing more generally.

Enter competitions

Submitting your work for writing competitions can be another good way to improve confidence. Even if you don’t hear anything back at first, the process of getting your work ready to send and then posting it off is a good lesson to learn. Over time, it becomes normal. And the more you write, the happier you’ll be with your competition entries and you’ll be more confident when you put them in the post.

Confidence has a lot to do with experience, so keep writing. Believe in yourself, and remember why you love writing so much – most of the time, that’s all we need to keep going. And over time, your confidence should build up naturally.

But what do you think? How did you build up your writing confidence?