Write Something You Would Enjoy Reading

No one ever committed suicide while reading a good book, but many have tried while trying to write one.

-Robert Byrne

I had no idea that the biggest obstacle I would have to overcome before I could become a writer worth reading would be insecurity. The reason I was so self-conscious about my writing was the belief that if I was going to make a living as a writer, everything I wrote had to have mass appeal. My obsession with achieving the unrealistic goal of writing something that everyone would like meant I was constantly second-guessing myself, being unduly critical and basically just not getting any enjoyment out of the creative process. In time my fear of alienating anyone who might encounter my words rendered me incapable of jotting down more than a few ideas at a time, because almost as soon as I’d written them down I’d start thinking of how I could re-word them so as make them as accessible and “reader-friendly” as possible. It got to the point where I despaired of ever again completing a written composition of even moderate length.

Eventually it became clear to me that there was just no way I was going to be able to write something that would be guaranteed to please everybody, or even anybody else other than myself for that matter. Tastes vary, and what one individual considers to be brilliant and insightful, another poohs-poohs as being corny and cliched. In the end, all I could do was try to live up to my standards of what good writing should be, and hope that what resulted lived up to enough people’s standards for me to build a good following. At the very least, it would make sitting down to write something to look forward to to, rather than something to dread.