I've made a post about this once before but it was more about editing and coding than writing. But this one is going to be more about writing because I know some people need to hear this.

Just because you don't find yourself to be as good at writing as another person here, it doesn't mean you aren't talented. Some things come easier to others, and that's okay. There's people a thousand leagues better than me, and bold as this statement is, there's people that aren't as good as me.

It's okay to have a bit of an ego and know your worth, but it's also okay to be a little self-conscious. I don't necessarily see it as a bad thing.

I don't really watch AdventureTime, at all. But Jake, that yellow dog, said it best.

❝

Dude, suckin' at somethin' is the first step toward bein' sorta good at somethin'.

Not many of you know this about me but I was an English major. I should also mention I never graduated because I'm awful and lose motivation very quickly with things I'm not totally interested in. At the very least, I still learned some things and haven't forgotten those things.

In my freshman year, I had to take a class referred to as WRIT101. My professor was cool and very unconventional. One of our first assignments in that class was called Shitty First Drafts. Go ahead, laugh. We all did. I'm just gonna put here what I wrote for that first assignment. I can't remember some of the context I was responding to, so I'm leaving what makes sense in this context. It was mainly directed at writing, before.

1. It's almost like a rule that we despise our early work. We constantly want to make our work better. And that's why we have shitty first drafts. It's a mess of all our thoughts that we have to work to clean up.
2. Hardly anything is perfect on the first try, so you kind of have to trust both yourself and your 'shitty first draft' to point you in the right direction.

My Slytherin side is probably going to show a bit here, (yes I'm a Harry Potter nerd, shut up), but again, self-consciousness isn't a bad thing, to a certain point. It means you care. If you care, you want to get better at it. If you want to get better, the best way to do it is to swallow your pride and ask for help.

I'm not the best teacher out there, and Lord knows I can be blunt, but I don't sugarcoat things. You'll come to find I'm very opinionated. If you come to me for help, you're going to get honest but constructive criticism. And if I can't offer advice, I will find a resource or website that can explain things better than myself. If I knew everything, I'd be a Ravenclaw.

(Kidding.)

If you don't like the way you write, think about what you can do to fix it.

Maybe you use certain words too much?
Try to find alternatives to those words.

Some of you know this, some of you don't, but I am on the autism spectrum (Asperger's), and on top of that, I have ADHD. On most days, being in my brain is like having 50 different tabs open on a web browser. It's very hard to concentrate, so my train of thought is often derailed and I have to "restart" to regain that focus.

This is why we have shitty first drafts.

Sometimes when I'm writing something, I'm only half-thinking about what I'm writing. I'm just writing everything that comes to mind. When I go back and read it with a "new set of eyes", I catch things that I didn't notice before when I was just typing for the sake of getting things out onto 'paper', as it were.

Sometimes I get caught up in a tangent and I realize what I wrote might be better as its own separate post so then my original focus isn't lost. I save the tangent to a new document for later and when I'm done with the original thing I was working on, I move on to my new idea.

Please remember. Shitty first drafts are a good thing. It's okay to look up to somebody else and admire them and their writing, but don't say that you suck in comparison to them because trust me, it will not help you and it can make those people feel uncomfortable.

You have things you're good at, they have things they are good at.
You have things you struggle with, and so do they.

Instead of deprecating yourself to lift up other people, give yourself some validation, too. There is no need to put yourself down to make other people feel good.

Everything I see or read, I take to heart. When I edit or write, I follow my gut and my instinct. I don't stop until I'm satisfied with what I see or read.

Everybody is going to develop their own way and style of doing things. Some people like extravagant writing with lots of poetic metaphors, some of us like to keep it relatively simple and to the point. Some of us are in the middle ground, and that's kind of where I've gotten to, at this point. I realize it now, more than ever, when I read over my old writing. My style is always changing, always evolving.

Self-consciousness becomes a bad thing when you start to undermine yourself and underestimate your capabilities. Recognize your strengths and own up to them. If you have weaknesses, acknowledge them, and start working on them until they become your strengths.

What I almost said but didn't: Find your weaknesses, and fucking crush them.