Crisis of Confidence.

by Adam Turner
17th July 2012

I recently came across the 7000 or so words I wrote for my dead-end writing hobby. I don't know why I stopped, but I just did. Anyway, four months have passed now and reading it again without the pompous naivety I wrote it with, I now realise my writing is a load of rubbish. It seems weaker and less physiological (does that make sense?) than I thought it was. I feel as though I want to start again but I don't want another 500 stories with only the first line and an over-thought title.

Should I start again?

Replies

It depends what you want.

I wrote one and three-quarter novels in my late teens, occasionally picking up the files in the loft over the years and thinking...exactly the same as you, really. I only went back to writing seriously almost thirty years later. And only then because I believed I had something to say.

If you belive the same and you want to write then do it. Life's too short for 'if only'. But this time plan out what you want to write from beginning to end so you have a path to follow. It doesn't matter if you wander off it - you wont get lost because you can see where you want to end up. And don't worry about writing rubbish - everyone does. The hard work of writing is revising and editing (which I'm doing at the moment - yuk!) And you can't do that without having something to revise.

Read a lot. Join a peer-review site, maybe. But get stuck in - you'll learn as you go along.

Good luck!

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Jonathan
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Jonathan Hopkins
17/07/2012