The Power of a Writer's Faith

Faith is a powerful force. It's not an empty concept and has nothing to do with wishful thinking. Faith is a true, unshakeable belief. This post is about having faith in our stories.

There's only one way to get through the slog of the first draft, the pain of editing, the angst of showing our work to someone for the first time, the horror of rewriting and more editing, the agony of querying, and so forth. We need to believe in our work, or else the part that makes the story unique and special will slip away.

Not everyone will like our stories. We may have to go through hundreds of agents in the hunt to find someone who is interested in representation. We might have to suffer a barrage of doubts, not only from ourselves but our families, our critique partners, our friends. If we have an unshakeable faith in our story, a deep understanding of it, and a determination to stick to that vision, then it's that faith which will carry us through to the end.

If we don't have that faith, then we're easily tossed about. We end up tweaking the life out of our stories because they're never good enough. We'll be easily swayed by every single suggestion a critique partner gives us, every voice-changing advice a friend offers us.

Writing those unique stories requires a powerful bravery to stand firm against the onslaught, especially when rejections start coming in from industry professionals.

So no more floundering to please others. Advice is simply that: advice. Weigh it carefully, understand where it's coming from and why it's being given, then consider it some more and either take it, or dismiss it based on what you believe is right for your vision of the story. Your vision.

How do you maintain your faith in your stories? Do you struggle to know which advice to take and which to ignore?

I wrote this post for the Insecure Writers' Support Group, founded by Alex J Cavanaugh. We post on the first Wednesday of every month.

If you'd like to join, then check it out here.



The Liebster Award—Thank you to Emaginette who gave me the Liebster Award. To accept it, I'm supposed to answer a few questions. Instead I'll answer just the one: If you could write with any color of ink, what color would it be? Purple. I write all my first drafts in longhand with my purple pens so I go through a few, but do you know how hard it is to find purple pens in Australia? It's easy to get them in multi-colour packs, but I don't want all the other colours. I just want purple.