as small as a world and as large as alone, Dear DD: I want to write, but I often struggle...

12:15pm June 25, 2014

lightboundhero asked: Dear DD: I want to write, but I often struggle with the feeling of my writing being inferior compared to other people who write around me; friends and acquaintances who aren't even published (yet) but whose work never fails to be amazing. These are people who, I feel, also have taken in many more stories than I have, written or otherwise; I feel like I'm too far behind them (in a sense) to catch up, whether in amount of stuff read or written. I guess I'd like whatever advice you could give.

dduane:

The first thing I’m going to say to you here – which may or may not be any comfort to you – is that you’re in exactly the same boat as all the rest of us. No matter how long you write over the course of your life, no matter who you write for or under what circumstances, there will always be better writers than you and there will always be worse ones. So this is a situation that you’re going to have to make your peace with, sooner or later. Sooner is better.

This being the case, the next thing to work on is figuring out how you’re going to handle these feelings of inadequacy when they come up. If you let them stop you, you won’t get much writing done. So you have to do some self-examination and find out what ways work best for you at those times when you have to motivate yourself to do something you find difficult.

(sticking in a cut here, this is going to get a touch technical…)

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