A Writing Tip to Believe that you Actually Can

I’m a writer who sets weekly and monthly goals for myself. Inevitably, there are times when I’ve crushed my goal, writing two complete chapters rather than just finishing the one I had planned. And it’s so easy to forget to celebrate these small wins. But there are also times when I’m in a rut of continually not meeting goals, planning to write for an hour, but only making it to twenty minutes. ANd it can be hard to resist the judgement.

But most of us are not full-time authors, so we can’t expect to produce the work a fresh brain with all the time at our disposal would be able to. We like to tell ourselves we should. There’s that dreaded word “should” again, trying to prove that we need to feel good about writing to feel worthy of writing. The important thing to remember is that we can only be where we’re at. It’s simple but true.

Will dedication and perseverance and hard work build our skills faster? Absolutely.
Could we be doing more? Valuable question.

Can we really be doing more or does our self-critic have us convinced of something impossible? Were we able to write two chapters last week because we got off a little early from work, things are going well with the significant other, and we had energy to give? Or were we unable to complete our three poems because our tires got slashed, we had to help our mom through a crisis, and we didn’t have the energy to dedicate?

Think of sitting down to write like building your writing muscles. You can’t go from lifting 5lb dumbbells to 45lb in one week. It takes daily, weekly, consistent dedicated time to achieve progress. It is the same with writing. You can’t expect to produce a lot of content in a short period of time without the practice of continually sitting down to write and providing for yourself the space to be creative in how you sleep, what you’re eating, who else you are emotionally supporting, and what actual time you have for your craft. You will get there, but be kind to yourself and reflect honestly if there’s space to get better, or if you’re still just a baby tiger trying to catch that mouse on the first try.