Sometimes writing seems to call me insistently, so that I can hardly wait to finish my chores and get stuck in.  At other times I find myself doing all sorts of other jobs when I should be writing; things that could easily wait until another time.  For me, this has a great deal to doing with self-esteem or fear of some sort.  If I’ve reached a point in my work in progress that I don’t feel ready to tackle, or that I don’t think I can do justice to, I’ll find reasons not to work on it.  Unfortunately, this can become a vicious cycle, as I can then cite how long it took me to write this type of scene as evidence that I’m no good at it, and this then fuels my low self-esteem the next time I need to write something in the same vein.

Today I want to share with you some of the strategies I have developed to work past this fear of writing something, in case I can’t write it well enough. Read more