Writer Secret Sauce - Confidence - How to Get?

 

An apprentice welder.

He's in a welding course. His work is overseen by his instructor. He works as a trainee with a welding firm. He attempts his first on-the-job weld. The solder mix was wrong. It didn't hold. He had to re-do and try again. After a couple more tries, the weld holds. His brain stores the correct weld mix ratio, the correct torch work, and on his next job, he's still nervous, but by gosh, he did it again. The weld held, and it was a professional attempt. Thereafter, with each successful try, his confidence in his skill rises, to the point that one day in the future, he will instruct others beginner welders, and the skill cycle marches on.

Sound familiar?

The ONLY Secret Sauce in a successful career is the gaining of confidence through trying, over and over, until the gaffes appear less with the developing skill.

I don't care if you're a welder, a bus driver, an IT programmer or a book writer. At some point, you must try. You must attempt to formulate on the skills you presently have to create a finished end, knowing that with each attempt, your skill increases, and so does that initially elusive confidence.

No one can make you try. You must decide to do that on your own, to accept that the gaffes will come, and with them a greater sense of what it takes to be a successful wordsmith.

The Secret Sauce is you. Your willingness to put it all on the line to create. There is no safety net in your draft. You don't need one to finish your manuscript. That comes once the draft is done, and you rely on beta readers and an editor to insure your best result is presented.

But without your determination to try and to complete that draft, no amount of anything or anyone can help you. That completed draft is up to you.

Your Secret Sauce is in your will power, your fortitude, your acceptance of a level below perfect.

With each sentence, paragraph, scene and chapter, you are building onto the foundation to create a whole storied house. That construction — an imagined idea to a real entity, a book — is only in your hands.

Courage + Fortitude + Willingness to Make Mistakes + Desire to Learn from Mistakes = Writer Confidence = Secret Sauce.

You alone are the creator. If you do not create your vision, no one else can. That book will never be written without your attempt.

Are you okay with the world not having your book? I bet you aren't.