I recently moved from a home on the outskirts of Seattle to a very small town in a rural area, six hours away.  Gearing up for selling our old house, buying our new house, and then moving took up most of last year.  The year prior to that, I had a different set of challenges. I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer, fortunately in early stages, and it had taken up a good chunk of the year getting things like surgery and radiation handled.  Both years meant taking a hit on my writing and my coaching work.

Over the course of all of this, my mojo went missing.  My writing was definitely a step off.  Hell, my whole life was a few bubbles off plumb.

I was having a crisis of confidence.

I was missing my faith.

If there’s one key component in a writer’s toolbox, it’s faith. Faith is the invisible fuel that propels us forward in the face of critique and rejection.  It’s the scaffolding that keeps us from collapsing when we see systematic injustice. It’s the rope that we cling to when we’re trapped in a blinding blizzard of doubt, convinced that our writing is wretched and we should abandon all hope and pursue something more stable, like running a three-card-monte game.

Faith is elusive, and by its very nature, illogical. You can’t learn faith. You can’t study it or buy it. You either have it, or you don’t.

So what do you do when you lose faith in your writing, and yourself? [Read more…]