Take the advice

I’ve been caught on a wire as of late. Walking the fine line between forward motion and standing still. I wrote a post a couple of months ago about reading too much–too many helpful articles, too much advice from other writers and authors and how I believed it was negatively impacting my thought process and my ability to move forward at a greater rate. In that post I said that sometimes you need to trust yourself, believe in your writing, in your story and stop allowing the chatter and opinions of all the other sources to derail you.

I think I was wrong. Not about believing in yourself or your story but about not needing to take advice from fellow authors at a certain point in your writing. I thought that after almost a year in, I should just trust myself and my work. And that perhaps all the advice reads were slowing me down and making me question too much.

Questioning is good. Questioning is needed, whether it slows you down or not. My setbacks are my own, the information I allow to penetrate or side track my forward motion is also mine. Every piece of information that is read doesn’t need to resonate or sink in. But the few that do seep through the cracks, go a very long way and can mean the difference between great and good, good and fair. And the authors out there, a lot of them who I follow (in my blogroll), know what they are saying. They are in this business. So take the advice, all the way to the end and then again through the query process and the submission process and the revision and on and on…….