Two-Fifty Tuesday: Who Cares?

Keep The Faith

The hardest part about writing isn’t forming ideas, or creating outlines or drafting pages. 

The hardest part is believing that your work has value.

Who really cares whether you write? You do, and maybe your family or friends, but the rest of the world? 

If you have a day job and you don’t show up for work one day, someone cares. It could be “you’re-in-trouble” kind of concern or “is everything-okay” worry, but your absence will be noticed. 

If you don’t write for a day, a week, a month, will anyone care? 

It’s hard to keep the faith that what you do as a writer is worthwhile, when societal pay-offs (money, recognition, impact) are, at best, far off, at worst, only in your imagination. 

How do you keep slogging through page after page when you fear that no one cares? 

You have faith in yourself. 

It’s a herculean task that requires bravery and courage and no small amount of confidence. 

But it’s also absolutely do-able. You don’t need that bravery and courage and confidence right away. You can work up to it. One word, one page at a time, you’ll come to believe what I already know: your writing has extraordinary value. 

How can I say I have faith in you if I may not have read your work? Because I have faith in the value of stories. And I have faith that every voice—your voice—is important. 

Because anyone who ventures to write is heroic.