Failing is a strong word to use when we talk about writing, mostly because writing is an ongoing journey, and so it’s almost impossible to say that we’ve “failed” at it. However, this doesn’t change the fact that many writers DO feel like they are failing at writing.
Whether we’re not living up to our own standards, or we’re not showing up for our writing commitments, the feeling of failure as a writer is common for most of us. And although we might think the reason we feel this way is obvious, the real issue that leads us to feel like we are failing at writing is difficult to see clearly.
What’s going on much of the time for writers when we feel like we are failing at writing is that we are out of alignment with our creative calling. This often causes us to constantly look around at what everyone else is doing and compare our writing to the way other people write. Writers usually do this when we get scared that we-and our writing-aren’t good enough. We play the comparison game in an attempt to figure out what we should be doing that might make us successful as writers, and then we get lost in that game.
This always ends in us feeling worse about ourselves, and very discouraged about our writing. It also increases the fear we were already feeling, which builds a wall of resistance inside of us. After that, tuning into our creativity-and expressing our truth as a writer-is harder than it ever was before.
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