
Let’s be honest.
We writers have several fears about writing.
If we haven’t published anywhere, we fear to call ourselves a writer. Many times we fear judgment about what we write, so we stall, procrastinate and write on the surface. We fear we don’t have an MFA and don’t know enough about the writing craft.
When our short story, poem, or novel is finished, we fear to send out our work to a beta reader because we might hear something about our writing that we don’t want to hear.
One of the biggest fears? Our fear of rejection. We spend so much time perfecting a query and sending it to a lit agent only to never hear from them again, or we get a form rejection, which may be our 25th.
Fear stagnates. We stop flowing, we find ourselves trapped, or producing dull work.
Last week, I came across two helpful blog posts. (One I’d never read before). Both helped me reassess any fears I had about my writing. It is no mistake these posts found me.

The first comes from Krissy at Visionaire Kindness Words.
God grant me serenity, to believe,
without a doubt, I’m a writer.
Poet enough to hold this pen,
courage to write the things that secretly haunt me,
and wisdom to always edit
The second way to fight fear comes from Rebekah Radice, who I follow on Twitter.
F Face
E Everything
A and
R Run
OR
Reframe that F.E.A.R
Face It
Explore It
Accept It
Rise Above It
The “It” in the above scenario is whatever the fear is:
Face your insecurities.
Explore the possibilities of writing with abandon.
Accept that fear will creep in on days when you’re too tired, hungry, angry or hurt. Acknowledge your feelings and later put pen to paper.
Rise above the particular circumstance you face and get back to your road in writing.
I try to remember when I’m writing something that this draft is just for me, nobody has to see it, so it doesn’t matter whether it’s bad or good! And although rejection is hard, sending pieces out there is exciting and who knows, you might just get some successes out of it!
LikeLike
Great tip! I think I’ll place a Post-It on my laptop that says, “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY.”
Thanks for stopping by, Andrea.
LikeLiked by 1 person
wow! love reading this, 🙂 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
And I’m so glad you shared your Writers Serenity Prayer. Thank you!
LikeLiked by 1 person
oh most welcome and I’m grateful for your blog, I needed this today.. 🙂
LikeLike
Love both posts and their encouragement!
LikeLike
Glad to hear it, Jennifer!
Dear readers, please be on the lookout for Jennifer’s newest book coming out next month.
LikeLike