by Dave Haslett
Fortunately, there are lots of ways of getting your confidence back. Here are just a few of them:
Self-help books
A book on improving your self-confidence will probably include several exercises to try. Don’t skip them: you’re unlikely to regain your self-confidence by just reading about it. Practise the exercises in a safe environment and gradually rebuild your confidence until you no longer have a problem.
Of course, you don’t just want to recover your old self-confidence; you want to have more self-confidence than you ever did. So look for books and courses that teach you how to gain supreme self-confidence. It’ll take time and effort to achieve this, but once you’ve mastered it you’ll be able to handle anything, including TV and radio interviews, book signings, speeches, presentations and lecture tours, and all sorts of other things that will help you promote and sell your book.
You might not have dared to think about doing these things previously. So your writer’s block, and the steps you take to overcome it, might actually be a blessing in disguise.
Self-hypnosis
Professional hypnosis sessions can be expensive and you need to attend them regularly to get the maximum effect. Fortunately, self-hypnosis is just as effective and it’s much cheaper and more convenient.
You’ll receive a CD or a downloadable recording. You don’t have to read anything or do any exercises; all you have to do is close your eyes, relax and listen. Some people go into a trance-like state or fall asleep, and some don’t. It doesn’t matter what happens; it should still work anyway.
Try searching online for “self-hypnosis for writer’s block”. There are several products available. Self-hypnosis products that address anxiety and confidence should also help.
I tried I Can Make You Confident by Paul McKenna. I was feeling tired, a little depressed, and extremely annoyed about something that had happened earlier in the day. I didn’t think that listening to a CD would make the slightest difference. But when it ended, I felt wide awake, full of energy and ready to take on anything. I didn’t feel as if I’d been in a trance and I hadn’t been asleep, yet I could feel myself waking up from … something. The thing that had been causing the negative thoughts seemed so insignificant now that it wasn’t even worth thinking about any more.
It had taken me about three weeks to get over something like that previously, so I was impressed that it had all been sorted out in just forty-five minutes.
Supportive friends
Your friends and family can help you regain your confidence too. Give them some examples of your writing, either from your current work-in-progress or from previous projects, and tell them you’re only looking for positive comments.
Ask them which parts they like best and why; which parts are particularly well-written; and so on.
There’s a time and a place for criticism, but this isn’t it. If they find any errors or badly written sections, ask them not to tell you about them until you’ve got your confidence back.
Go through all their positive comments afterwards, and copy the best ones onto a single page that you can look at when things get tough.
You could also do this with the members of your local writing group, in an online writers’ group, or in a writing class. The other members could do the same to help them build their own confidence.
Success is its own reward
There’s nothing like a bit of success to give your confidence a boost. Success at writing proves you have a talent for it and you’re doing it right. There are four main ways of proving your writing ability:
Getting published.
Winning a competition, or at least making the shortlist.
Receiving praise from people who are qualified to give it: writing tutors, competition judges, publishers, agents, editors, published writers, professional critiquers, professional assessment services, and so on.
Getting great reviews.
Until you have proof of your ability, you’ll always have a nagging doubt about it. One of the fastest ways of getting that proof is to write short stories and magazine articles, and get them published.
Research the magazine markets: find out who their readers are, the types of stories and articles they prefer, and so on. Then write things that specifically target those readers.
Short stories should be written in advance, but, as we saw earlier, it’s best not to write articles until they’ve been commissioned. Come up with five or six article ideas for each magazine, then email the editor with the list of titles together with a sentence or two for each one that explains what it’s about and how you’ll cover it.
Include a copy of one of your previously published articles if you have one, or a link to an article that’s been published online – even if it’s on your own website or blog, or a guest post on someone else’s.
There are plenty of books and courses available that can teach you how to write short stories and articles and get them published.
Remember, you aren’t writing these things to make money; you’re only looking for confirmation of your ability. A single sale, or seeing your name on a competition shortlist, will be enough. But you’ll be competing against hundreds of other writers, many of whom have years of experience and an extensive publishing history, so you shouldn’t expect to succeed straight away.
Use an online critique group to hone each piece of writing until it’s as good as you can possibly get it before you submit it to a magazine or enter it into a competition.
If you’ve had no stories or articles published after a year of sending them out, and your name hasn’t appeared on any shortlists, consider taking a writing course. Or submit a piece of your work to a professional appraiser who will highlight any weak areas you need to work on.
Change your wallpaper
Some writers say they’ve collected enough rejection slips to cover their walls. I hope they don’t really display them on their walls! Who on earth would want to reminded of their failures every time they went into their writing room or looked up from their desk? How depressing would that be? No wonder they get writer’s block.
Aim to turn your walls into a gallery of success instead. Cover them with acceptance letters; competition wins; shortlists with your name on them; positive reviews, comments and praise; the covers of your published books; and copies of cheques or bank transfers you’ve received.
You might even have a few of these already, from earlier books, short stories, poems or articles that have been published. Stick them up on your wall where you can see them. You’ll immediately feel a whole lot better, and you’ll get that feeling again every time you enter the room or look up from your writing. It’s proof that you really can do it!
It will take you a while to cover your walls, of course. But it will be worth the wait.
And relax…
If you’re suffering from writer’s block, you’re also suffering from stress and tension. That might be the cause of your writer’s block, or it might be the result of it. Either way, you need to get rid of it.
A relaxing bath can work wonders. But how about taking it a stage further and lighting the room with scented candles? And while you’re at it, put some herbal bath salts or oils in the water and listen to something soothing.
Natural sound recordings are great for this – and many people like to have them playing when they’re writing too. As I mentioned earlier, they’re great for drowning out background noise. Bubbling waves and gently lapping waves can be fantastically soothing in the bath. But if you want something more inspiring, you can get recordings of more dramatic sounds, including thunderstorms and waves crashing against rocks.
Healthy competition
Have you tried talking to your partner or best friend about your writer’s block? Or you could talk to them about other problems you’re having with your writing: how to get your hero out of the hole he’s stuck in, or the best way of explaining something technical. Anything is worth a try when you’re stuck.
Occasio
nally they’ll come up with the perfect solution, but most of the time they won’t understand the situation as well as you do, and their suggestions might seem worthless. But their mediocre ideas should trigger your competitive instinct: you’ll try to go one better, and new ideas will start to form.
Or they might miss the point so completely that their crazy suggestions send your thoughts in a different direction, leading to a flood of new ideas.
Fear of success
You might have writer’s block because you’re scared of success. It’s a common problem. What if everyone who knows you finds out you’re a writer? What will your friends and family think? What would your mother think? Or your granny? What if your publisher or agent wants you to go on television, or do a book signing tour, or give talks, or visit schools? You might be saying to yourself: I couldn’t possibly do that; I’d be so embarrassed.
Fortunately, there are several solutions:
Become supremely self-confident, as we saw earlier. Books, practical exercises, and self-hypnosis recordings can help you achieve this. But it will take time and effort.
Use a pen name.
Don’t tell anyone you’re a writer.
Tell your publisher you don’t want to take part in any publicity. That means no author’s photo on the back cover of your books, no book signings, and no broadcast interviews. You might agree to give interviews in text form, as long as they don’t use your photo or real name.
Hire a friend or an actor to do all your publicity work. He’ll pretend to be you and bathe in the limelight while you remain invisible and anonymous behind the scenes.
Perhaps you’ll come out of hiding and use your real name once you’re sure your writing will be well received. If you use a pen name for your first few books and they become bestsellers, you could use both your real name and your pen name on the cover of your next book. For example: “Stan Bean writing as Martina Moog”. In this example, Stan Bean is the author’s real name, but he used the pen name Martina Moog for his earlier books.
Another idea is to do something that you consider much more dangerous and thrilling than giving a speech or appearing on television. How about doing a sponsored parachute jump, abseiling down a cliff or tower, or swimming with sharks? Being a successful writer and promoting your book might seem rather tame after that, and you’ll be able to take it all in your stride.
Fear of blank screens and blank paper
Empty screens and blank pages can be so intimidating, can’t they! The best solution is to avoid them.
Find some text from somewhere: it could be an article from a website or something you wrote in the past. It needn’t have anything to do with the book you’re writing. Open the text in your word processor, or copy it from the website and paste it in. That immediately gets rid of the horrible emptiness.
Start writing somewhere in the middle of the document. You’ve now got text above and below the point where you’re working – and not a blank page in sight.
When you’ve finished writing that section, delete the text you pasted in, leaving only your new piece of writing.
If you write on paper, you should be able to devise something similar. For example, you could divide the paper into two columns and write letters to your friends on one half of the page and your book on the other. Or write a letter to a friend on the even-numbered lines and your book on the odd-numbered lines. You’ll have to copy the text out again afterwards, but that will be easy in comparison. (And you could always get someone else to do it.)
Take a break
You can take a break from your writing if you need to, but still remain creative.
If you’re struggling to write fiction, you could design a cover for your book, draw or doodle pictures of your characters, draw or paint a scene from the story, draw maps and floor plans of all the locations, find relevant quotations to go at the start of each chapter, and so on.
In the case of non-fiction, you could also design a cover for your book, but you might need other things too: photographs, illustrations, charts, maps and so on. Now might be a good time to sort those out.
Another option is to switch to a different form of writing. If you’re struggling with a novel about someone who suffers from a particular disease, for example, perhaps you could take a break from it and write a non-fiction book about the disease instead. You might need to research it – or at least do more research than you did for your novel – and that could give you a new insight into your character’s life. That aspect of the story could become much more powerful when you return to writing it.
Similarly, if you’re struggling to write a non-fiction book, you could try writing a novel that dramatizes some of the adventures people went through in real life. You might have come across several fascinating examples as you researched your book.
If you write non-fiction books about cycling, a dramatic retelling of one of the first bicycle races could make a compelling novel. Your story might feature rival riders, the rival manufacturers and how they regarded and treated each other, different designs of bicycle and the modifications the engineers made after testing, and all the key moments leading up to the famous event. The climax of the story will be the race itself and what happened afterwards. As it’s fictional, you can make some of it up, make things more dramatic than they actually were, and include conversations that didn’t take place and people who weren’t actually there. You could even set it a few years before the real event and make up the entire thing.
Perhaps you just need to get away from your book for a while. Go for some long walks along a beach or through a forest. Go hill climbing. Have a cycling weekend. Do whatever you like to do – ideally in the great outdoors.
If the weather is too bad to go out, or your health isn’t up to it, invite some friends over for a movie weekend or a board games tournament, or something like that.
Don’t think about your book at all. You’ll return to your writing in a few days feeling refreshed and inspired, with plenty of new ideas, and a clearer understanding of where things are going.
A final tip
If you’re severely blocked, stay away from your computer or notepad. You need to work out the exact words you’re going to use before you write them down – and you can do that anywhere.
If all you can manage is a single sentence, that’s fine. Write it down and start thinking about the next sentence. Maybe you’ll write that one tomorrow. It’s a painfully slow way of writing, but at least you’re writing something. And it’s better to write slowly than not at all.
Your urge and ability to write will kick back in. Perhaps while you’re writing tomorrow’s sentence you’ll think of a brilliant follow-on sentence, and you’ll write that one down too. Terrific stuff – you’re fighting back! You’ll soon be back up to full speed.
You’ll find lots more ideas for preventing and curing writer’s block in my book 143 Smashing Ideas for Crushing Your Writer’s Block.
The next step
If you’ve written all the easy parts of your book but “The End” still seems a long way off, how will you stayed motivated enough to get through the rest of it. We’ll deal with that next.
17. Staying motivated
A motivated writer is a happy writer – and a highly productive one. You’ll be churning out words at a scorching pace, fully engaged with your book and loving every minute of it. But how do you get yourself into that happy state, and how do you keep yourself there once you’ve done it?
Focus on success
In Chapter 2, I asked you what you hoped to achieve from writing books. It’s a good idea to keep reminding yourself of this, as you’ll always know what’s driving you on, and why you want to be a successful writer.
To give up your deadbeat job.
To improve your work-life balance.
To have the freedom to do whatever you want, whenever you want, wherever you want.
To provide a decent future for your children or grandchildren.
To
be wealthy and live in a castle.
Fame, acclaim, recognition.
To travel the world meeting interesting people – and getting paid for it.
To be remembered by future generations.
Or a special reason of your own.
Once you’ve decided what’s driving you to succeed, find some pictures that represent your idea of success and surround yourself with them. If you want to travel, pin up maps and photos of the places you want to visit. If you want to live in a castle, find a photo of one you like and stick it on your wall. If you want to be wealthy, use your computer to create a fake bank statement that shows you’re worth millions. Print it out and hang it on your wall.
Leave short, inspirational phrases and photos around your house – on doors, on mirrors, on the edge of your computer screen, on notice boards, on the fridge door, on your car’s dashboard, and anywhere else you can think of. You could get them printed on your mouse mat. Or how about getting them printed on t-shirts and giving them to your partner, children or grandchildren to wear?
If you want to give up your job, think about what you want to do instead – apart from writing all the time. Start making plans that will get you to that point. You might be able to start doing some of those things right now, as if you’d already left work.