From Audacity to Self-Confidence
by
Mary Deal
When writing, you should be emotionally pumped up to meet any challenges of your plot. Instead of wondering if you should write this or that, stop censuring yourself. Write it. Through the audacity of daring yourself, you turn your creativity loose.
Yes, there are barriers in how you write, but not what you write. Those barriers keep you writing sensibly and for the reading market. If your genre is a romance, sex or bedroom scenes may be obligatory. In fact, sex is obligatory in just about anything these days. But the type of sex scene will vary from one genre to another. I use the obligatory scene only as an example to show that styles of writing differ with each genre; also, to show that you need to have the audacity to write what your genre demands. Audacity lets you test the boundaries of the genre to make your story as exciting and true as possible. Without audacity, your story may end up being a flat read.
However, when it comes to having a finished product and touting your book to the public, audacity must be tempered. It is done through attitude. You cannot come across as a know-it-all to those who would learn from you and buy your book. In fact, you should be seeing yourself as helping others write their stories. You don’t have to offer classes and teach, just be there for people when you speak with them and they ask questions. It’s a subtle change of attitude from audacity to self-confidence.
Too, misused audacity can kill an author’s chances of gaining a wide reading audience. Nothing hurts more than to tout your book as something it hasn’t yet proven to be.
How many times have you read someone saying their book is destined to become a classic, or destined to become a blockbuster. Authors cannot make any such claims of their own books. These types of claims or reviews need to be made by people whose word carries weight, like book reviewers and other important people who didn’t have a hand in the writing of it. How can an author know if their book will become a blockbuster, and so on. The proof is in the reading and reviewing by significant others, and that doesn’t include family.
Something else authors mistakenly do when promoting their book is to compare it to another popular book:
Jane Eyre meets Gone with the Wind.
Spider Woman meets Wonder Woman.
Any such comparisons are foolish and career breaking. Your book is not about anything but what you’ve written until it’s tested in the reading market.
In touting your book, certain protocols need be followed. You cannot…
…say your book is the greatest
…say your characters are like this one or that one in any other story
…compare yourself to any other writer
Audacity has two faces and they need to be practiced. First, as a writer to release total creativity into the process of writing; second, to learn how to present yourself as a self-confident author who’s finished a book and doesn’t allow an over-inflated ego to get in the way of further success.
Please visit Mary Deal’s website for more wonderful articles like this one: Write Any Genre.
