Perhaps it’s because I’ve had a bad writing day (a few bad writing months actually) but I’m having a confidence crisis. Maybe publicly declaring I was finally going to make writing an integral part of my life whilst committing to an NCTJ course, trying to manage two blogs, a book and nine associated social media accounts was a bit ambitious. Maybe this is just how aspiring writers feel at the beginning?

I didn’t even know if I could technically refer to myself as a writer when I wrote the title for this post. Am I a writer or does it have to have the prefix ‘aspiring’ because my limited ‘literary’ contributions have yet to be validated by anyone other than family and friends? I looked in my Chambers dictionary – they simply define a writer as follows, ‘Writer – someone who writes’. That solves that problem then.

What if I am the writing equivalent of an auditionee on the X Factor?  The ones who genuinely, truly believe that they can sing because their family and friends say they can. The ones who walk out of the audition room shouting that Simon Cowell has made a mistake and that they’ll have a number one hit and he’ll regret his decision. What if I am that person?

Herein lies my problem, by their silence, are my well-meaning, supportive relatives and friends complicit in further enabling my continued (and potentially misplaced) belief that maybe I can write? Would it be better to stop now before I send more musings out into the vast, unforgiving world of the internet?

I haven’t decided yet – but I do enjoy writing and let’s face it, there aren’t really that many people who read my blog posts anyway. There might be those who’ve seen the link on Facebook who politely glance at my page, or those who inadvertently stumble across it when they’re on the 5th page of Google search results that have spuriously returned a link to one of my blog posts. Other than that, I think my audience is quite limited!

It has been unreliably suggested that Ernest Hemingway said, “Write drunk, edit sober” and I like that sentiment, whoever it came from. I could comfortably have a glass of wine (I’m a lightweight) and wax lyrical in a drunken state about any number of things or at the very least, whatever nonsense happened to be in my head that particular night. However, I imagine that if I’d been wise enough not to publish my drunken ramblings, when I edited them in a sober state, the word count would drop to zero rather quickly!

Hemingway has also (more reliably) been quoted as saying, “Always do sober what you said you’d do drunk. That’ll teach you to keep your mouth shut” so perhaps it’s about balance – maybe half a glass of wine and a night at the lap top is the way forward.

Why I like to write hasn’t changed; I want to write for me, yes I’d like to be good at it, yes I’d like other people (unrelated to me) to think, “this isn’t bad!” and I still hope it might take me somewhere but if it doesn’t, at least I can say I tried.