‘If you do it despite how afraid you are, you start to build your confidence’ How can you overcome a loss of confidence? Author Meg Mason overcame her fear of failure after she had to scrap an 85,000 word manuscript. Read her advice in our NEW article:
Have you ever had to overcome your fears? Australian writer and journalist Meg Mason had to do just that after a failed book manuscript. Despite having spent months writing 85,000 words, she deleted the entire manuscript and asked her publishers not to read it. She vowed to never write fiction again.
“After the failed manuscript, I needed to rehabilitate myself from the lowest place, when you have no confidence,” says Meg. “So, I would start every morning by writing out everything I was scared of on paper: ‘I can't do it. I don't have the talent.’ I’d just put it on the page and then one day I started replying to myself. I would write: ‘But it's okay because…’ So, it became this conversation. Some days I'd need to write for half an hour, and other days it was two minutes.
“I decided: ‘I'm going to write now and then I'll come back to them.’ And usually, by the time I finished writing, they weren't relevant anymore. Be that as it may, I'm going to do it anyway. That was the phrase that got me through it.”“I used to write out the most ridiculous encouragement to myself, almost like positive affirmations,” says Meg.
“I think that's the thing to remember: If you're frustrated, it’s because you value it and it's meaningful to you. That's why you must continue with it.”“I found it really useful not to talk about it too much with other people,” says Meg. “You start to feel that there's expectation on you and I think your own mental monologue is enough to contend with. I was really contained about who I talked to about it.