How to Build Writing Confidence

Confidence includes an element of trust. Being confident about writing has to do with trusting or relying on one’s ability to write. As a goal, that’s rather vague and unhelpful. What’s missing is the acknowledgment that writing is something we figure out how to do every time we do it.

Being confident about writing has to do with trusting one’s ability to figure out how to write, over and over again.

Writing is different every time we do it. Every topic. Every project. Every day. Every mood. Rather than aiming for confident mastery of every one of those variables and every combination of variables, aim for confidence in your ability to solve and move through stuck spots as they occur.

Build confidence by personalizing and expanding your bag of writing tricks, by learning from your ever-growing history of solved writing problems, by seeking and finding ways through anything and everything the process of writing dishes up on the way to your writing goals and dreams.

You are uniquely qualified to solve your own writing problems. Sometimes, your solution might be to push on through, even though it’s not fun. Or instead, you might need to step back to get perspective. Or you might need to ask for help. Finding a meaningful solution begins with being willing to tell yourself the truth about where you are and what you need.

My mind often pulls the phrase confide in from the word confidence. Confidence is built by confiding in yourself about what’s really going on. You can’t build your writing skills or your writing confidence by blindly or robotically following someone else’s rules, or by kidding yourself about the source of the problem.

Make your writing journey personal. Tune in to your own needs, to your resistance and the source of it, to your yearnings and your pain, to your wisdom. Then you can find and create solutions that work best for you. Keep doing that, and confidence accrues.

Though not always easy, building writing confidence is simple: Tell yourself the truth and practice figuring out your own writing process. Every single time you work through a writing challenge, however small, you build trust in yourself that you can figure out how to write, that you can master of the art of writing your way.

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Grace Kerina is the author of Personal Boundaries for Highly Sensitive People and other resources for quiet people. She has more than twenty years of experience helping writers and other creators find their true voices. Get her free ebook 7 Liberating Life Hacks for Highly Sensitive People when you subscribe to her newsletter. She also writes novels as Alice Archer.