Reading time: About 3 minutes
By temperament, I’m an “awfulizer” — someone who always imagines the worst possible outcome. If negative thoughts plague your writing, read on for some helpful advice…
A few years ago, a client told me she’d written one sentence so clumsy she wanted to delete the whole chapter.
One sentence. She was ready to torch 4,000 words over a single limp clause.
The sentence wasn’t her problem. The issue was her thinking.
Negative thoughts are a writer’s woefully faithful companion. They show up before you’ve typed a word, and they stay late, muttering, long after you’ve closed the laptop.
Psychologists have a name for these patterns. They call them cognitive distortions, which is a fancy way of saying your brain is lying to you with great confidence.
Here are six negative thoughts that hold writers back, and what to do about each one.
1-Catastrophizing
You write a weak paragraph and decide your book is doomed. You get one chilly comment from an editor and start planning your new career in retail sales.
Catastrophizing takes a small setback and inflates it into a disaster. The mind loves this trick because it feels like foresight. It isn’t. It’s fear wearing a trench coat and pretending to be wisdom.
The fix: say the actual worst-case scenario out loud. Usually it’s “I’ll revise this tomorrow.” Not exactly a house fire.
2-All-or-nothing thinking
This is the belief that a writing day is either brilliant or worthless. You wrote 200 words instead of 1,000, so you failed. You missed one morning, so the whole habit is ruined, and you may as well quit.
Black-and-white thinking ignores the huge, useful territory in between. And that middle ground is where books actually get written. A messy page still counts. A short session still counts.
The fix: trade the word “failed” for the word “started.” You showed up. That’s the whole job.
3-Mind reading
Here you decide, in advance, exactly what your reader will think. They’ll be bored. They’ll spot the flaw in paragraph three. Your clumsy metaphor will make them roll their eyes and reach for their phone to warn a friend.
You have no evidence for any of this. You’ve simply cast yourself as a mind reader, which is impressive, given that you can’t reliably guess what you want for lunch.
The fix: write for one real, kind reader. A friend who wants you to succeed. Everyone else can wait for the second draft.
4-Compare and despair
You open social media, and there’s a writer your age with a two-book deal and a headshot so smug you want to throw your laptop out the window. Suddenly your own work looks like wet cardboard.
Comparison is a rigged game. You’re measuring your rough draft against someone else’s polished, publicist-assisted highlight reel. Of course you lose. Everyone loses that game, including the writer with the smug headshot, who at this very moment is comparing herself to someone else and feeling like wet cardboard too.
The fix: compare your work today only to your work last year. That’s the one race worth running.
5-The inner critic who discounts the good
Some writers have a critic who accepts no evidence of competence. Write 10 strong pages and one flat one, and the critic files a detailed report on the flat one. The good pages? Never happened. A fluke. Beginner’s luck that somehow persisted for 20 years.
Discounting the positive keeps you permanently behind on your own ledger. You bank every failure and refuse every deposit of success.
The fix: keep a “done” list, not just a to-do list. Write down what worked. Then make your critic read it.
6-The tyranny of “should”
You should write every morning. You should be further along by now. Why aren’t you more like that writer with the headshot?
“Should” is a heavy, joyless word. It turns writing into a debt you can never repay, and it hires guilt as your motivational coach. Guilt is a terrible coach. It shows up and yells, then leaves you feeling worse than when you started.
The fix: swap “I should write” for “I get to write.” One is a sentence handed down by a judge. The other is a privilege. Same task, completely different weather.
The pattern behind the patterns
Notice what these six traps share. Each one treats a passing feeling as a permanent fact. Each one speaks with total certainty about a future it can’t possibly know.
Your job isn’t to silence the negative voice. You won’t, and trying will only hand you one more thing to feel bad about. Your job is to stop believing everything it says.
So, the next time your brain announces that your writing is ruined and everyone else is doing better, thank it politely for its input. Then write your imperfect, entirely sufficient page for the day.
Your brain will survive the disappointment. And so, I promise, will your writing.
Something I’m loving right now…
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My video podcast last week addressed how to deal with resistance. You can watch the video or read the transcript, and you can also subscribe to my YouTube channel.
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What tricks have you developed to stop negative thinking in its tracks? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by July 31/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
