Keep Your Confidence Up When It Gets Hard

(and it will get hard) 💪

How goes it, writerly friends? Things around here have been, shall we say, tricky? Perhaps you’ll be able to relate.

In the not-so-distant past, I came at you with advice on how to create and stick to a plan to make it to your next writing milestone. I shared how I structured my own plan to make it through my final major revision.

And then I hit a wall.

What happened? As is usually the case, it wasn’t one specific thing, it was several.

• Life happened, by which I mean, the other commitments in my life started demanding more attention than I had planned for. This is why I build extra time in, because it is inevitable. It’s also helpful if this doesn’t happen right at the start (🤬) but that’s just how it goes.

• I had to write essentially a new scene for the first time in a long time and my mind revolted. I didn’t want to write something ‘new’ because I saw endless revision in front of me and that’s not where my head is at. Never mind that I have the most solid of outlines to work from, which means this scene will be stronger from the get-go. I just…churned.

• I got some feedback on the first two chapters that was more than the hoped for “these are in great shape.” Friends, I have worked on these pages more than any others. I don’t know how many times they have been revised. I am SO SICK of thinking about them. Reading this feedback, I was resentful, not least of which was because I knew the feedback was right. (On the flip side, it was very easy to ignore all the things my coach told me were working really well!) 

Of course, the imposter syndrome kicked in. Who am I to be writing a book? How could I have ever thought I was smart enough or a good-enough writer to pull this off? Look at ALL this evidence to the contrary!

Yeesh. Thanks, bratty a-hole voice in my head. What did I ever do to you? (Forced writing instead of watching Schitt’s Creek for the umpteeth time, I guess.)

So how did I get myself out of this hole? 

I went back to my ‘why’.

Not for the first time, I reminded myself of my reasons for wanting to write this book in the first place. 

If you’re familiar with Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Book, you know what I’m talking about. For those of you that don’t, here’s the scoop:

My coaching mentor, Jennie, has this amazing Blueprint, which is a foundational piece of the book coaching practice for those of us that have been certified by Author Accelerator. The Blueprint helps you develop a framework for your novel. And Step 1 is Why Write This Book? 

As Jennie says, “I actually believe that not knowing the answer to why is one of the things that holds a lot of writers back. They know they like to write, they know they’re good at it, they know they have a story to tell, but they don’t know why it matters to them or what, exactly, it means to them. As a result, they write a book that doesn’t ever really get down to anything real and raw and authentic. They write pages that skate along the surface of things. And if there’s one thing readers don’t need, it’s to skate along the surface of things. That’s what social media is for.”

How does this relate to getting unstuck?

Knowing your why is also a key motivator when the going gets rough. That ‘real, raw, authentic’ juicy stuff that Jennie talks about? It’s what connects us to the importance of getting our story out there. It’s the guts, the meaning, the motivation.

I have written PAGES on my why at this point but ultimately it is a combination of wanting to tell the story of this woman who had this amazing life and felt to me like she had been a bit lost to history, as well as working through feelings I have about societal expectations (especially for women), motherhood, and learning to embrace/love your true self.

And yes, there’s more to it than that, but this is a writing newsletter, not a therapy session, so I’ll spare you that. 😉 Suffice it to say that I’ve identified some strong emotional connections to this work and when I feel like giving up, I plug back into that depth of feeling to remember why it matters to me.

I’ve created a worksheet to help you parse this question, because let’s be real—it’s not a small thing. The best answers to this question I’ve seen come from a writer’s willingness to be honest, to go deep, and to begin the process of getting raw and authentic in their answers. Remember, no one else ever has to see this (though your book coach will love you if you share it with them).

Know your 'why'—it's the thing that will keep you clear on your purpose and sustain you in the tough times.

If you want some help figuring out your ‘why’, I have a few 1:1 coaching spots open this spring. Grab a free coaching discovery session and let’s chat!

PS – I did an InstaLive with my own coach, Dani Abernathy. We got into how going deep on my why and its companion, figuring out my book statement (sometimes called the point), transformed my book. Check it out!