Learning To Trust Your Writing Process

​Part of becoming a writer is learning to trust your own writing process.
And it’s a lot harder than it sounds, because in order to trust your writing process, you have to be able to identify your writing process, and in order to identify your writing process, you have to have done enough writing to have a writing process to examine. You also have to know enough about writing, and OTHER writing processes to say, this is me, this is not me, this is how I work, this does not work for me. AND you have to have enough confidence, when faced with things that don’t work, to be able to say, this doesn’t work for me but that doesn’t mean i’m a failure. 
Becoming a writer means you have to write, even when you don’t know what you’re doing. You have to write enough words, you have to sit down in front of the page long enough, without being sure, in order for you to become sure. And no one else can give you that confidence, not commenters, not teachers, not other writers, not your mom, not an audience. It has to come from within you, partly because, as a writer, you’re at that page alone, and partly because sooner or later, the external validation will end, or will be challenged by critics. 
So here you are, writing in the dark, not knowing what you’re doing, what your process is or even what a writing process IS, being afraid of what you’re doing, what it means about who you are and your abilities and whether you even have the right to write anyway, but you just keep going.
You write and write and write until you get a glimmer of who you are as a writer, and what works for you, and you follow that light, and say, “yes, this is me, this is what works for me.” And you keep writing like that until you come up against some new struggle or new victory and you learn, “ah ha, this doesn’t work for me but this does.” And the picture of who you are as a writer expands. And you get more freedom as you write and grow more confidence as you figure out who you are and how you deal with the inevitable struggles of writing your story.
And then one day, you look up and realize, “hey, I know how to do this. I may not know precisely how I’m going to get there, but I know that I will be able to figure it out, because I trust myself to work through the process and it will get me where I need to go.”
Or not. Maybe you’re the kind of person who just sits down and goes and never has a moment of doubt. Or maybe you self medicate your doubt with drink or drugs. Or maybe you have a strict daily schedule of writing words that leaves no time for doubt. Or maybe your parents taught you that you can do anything and you are, in fact, the master of the universe. Whatever it is, you have to believe you can write and trust yourself to do it, and then. Just do it. 

originally posted on rosy-writes