Tag Archives: confidence

I’m afraid this is going to be a Monday Middle-aged Musing. I tried to write a “real” post (I put it in quotes, because what is this, an optical illusion?), but I am having a failure of confidence. Then I thought, there’s a ripe topic to muse about: confidence.

OK, I just started twice to write a sentence about needing confidence, but erased it because, you guessed it, I had no confidence in it. This happens to writers sometimes. We start to write something and think, “Oh, that’s dumb, nobody wants to read that.” Or, more nicely, “That isn’t quite what we want to say, is it?”

A trick I often employ is to grit my teeth, write it anyways, and don’t show it to anybody (including myself) till later. At that point, sometimes I look at it and say, “What was my problem? This is fine, send it out!” Sometimes I immediately see ways to revise it into something not contemptible. Or a judicious mix of those two responses. And yes, there is the case where I say, “Yikes! What was I thinking? Burn that!” (Of course I don’t actually burn it; safety first.) Surprisingly, that does not happen very often.

With a blog, however, especially a daily blog such as I aspire to, I’m on a constant deadline. Oh, I know, I know, write ahead, then I won’t have that problem. I’m working on it.

For some reason, I write something silly like this, and I don’t mind giving it a quick proof, sometimes reading it to my husband, and sending it out into the world. Why should this be? Ah, that calls for some half-baked philosophy, more suitable for Lame Post Friday (which seems a discouragingly long ways away, incidentally). For now, I simply observe the fact and hit “Publish.”

And I saved the draft of the post I started. I hope to share that with you later in the week.