When your main aim in life is to become a writer, a successful one at that, what do you do when that is taken away from you? Writer’s block is something that very commonly strikes at wordsmiths throughout their careers whether it is as a beginner trying to carve out a career or as a seasoned professional. However, losing confidence in what you are writing and trying to say is awful because you never know when you will get that self-belief back.

There are plenty of articles and self-help blogs for a writer that is stuck for ideas and for me now it is something I know how to deal with but the lack of confidence I’ve had in my writing of late is something I do not know how to fix.

Many ideas and half-finished articles ready to be edited or posted are still just sat there on my computer taking up space and not at all being a useful piece of work that I can be proud of. When you can’t really understand what you are trying to say or you think what you are saying is terrible and not at all relevant, fresh or exciting it starts to worry you slightly.

I’m not writing this in order to gain some sympathy or to wallow in my own self-pity but to highlight a point, something not necessarily brought up in the world of journalism. Journalists are always portrayed as very confident people always sure about themselves and what they want to write about but there are those and there are times in our careers spent questioning if your writing has a place in a world where so many articles are being churned out about every single subject every day, how do you make an article worthy of being read by people?

As the one thing I always fell back on, the greatest compliments I have ever received have always been about my writing. There must be a cause for this lack of confidence in that work and for me I know that it came about after a terrible university experience of having my confidence repeatedly knocked and it has clearly affected me more than I knew at the time. I’m not sure how you ever get your confidence back in writing really, the one thing I do know is that it is the one thing that I want to do with my career.

All I know is that if you really want something go out there and get it regardless of the amount of knocks you take, they happen to everyone but as we know true talent and sheer hard work always pays off in the end. So if you ever lose confidence and self-belief in your writing remember this happens to other people to, however difficult and scary it is at the time believe that what you are doing is the right thing and you will get there in the end. And to myself what I need to do on this one is to follow my own advice, the advice which I have just given you.