Kia ora lovely, how are you?
I had the pleasure of hanging out with a student of my online course Write Your Memoir earlier this week and she had come to a complete stop in her writing process.
Although she was quite capable of writing her story – she was clearly an experienced writer, and she’d spent years studying at university – a little voice was saying her story wasn’t good enough.
We’ve all been there right? We’ve all had moments where we doubted whether what we were writing or building or creating was ‘good enough.’ No matter how educated or experienced a writer is, I promise you we all have moments of doubting our work.
Our inner critic might have appeared a long time ago when a teacher or person in authority told us we weren’t ‘doing it right.’ From that day on, it stuck around, basically to help us do things the ‘right’ way.
And today, all it’s trying to do is help us, but that voice can sometimes convince us not to try at all.
This is one reason I encourage people to embrace their messy first draft and let their creativity run loose during that first version of their story. Then they can go back and polish it, perhaps even allowing their inner critic to help them tidy things up. But without that first draft, there’s no story at all.
So thank your inner critic for trying to help, and ask it to come back later, when you need it, if at all. Then return to the deeply important work of writing your story.
Charlotte x
PS for those of you who feel overwhelmed with information and don’t know where to start, I made you a new Memoir Planning Document. You can buy it here for $20 and make your own copy. You can read the backstory of why I designed this simple, but useful tool here.
Charlotte Squire 