Transform Your Writing With the Growth Mindset
Put self-doubt to rest with a growth mindset.
Self-doubt is like a sea creature, lying in wait under the calm, glass-still surface. You wade into the waters of creative writing joyfully, alone at first. Your confidence soars. Then other writers drift over to join you, making even bigger splashes around you than you ever did, making you question if you should even be in the water in the first place. Sensing your insecurity, the sea creature of self-doubt lunges and makes its attack, pulling you under. If you don’t struggle and fight back, the creature will drown you.
Self-doubt plagues us all. Even award-winning writers like Maya Angelou and Stephen King doubt their writing at times. But if they had let self-doubt win, we would have missed out on some of the best horror fiction and poetry ever written.
So how can we, the “average Joe/Jane” writer, squash self-doubt when it begins to plague us?
I have one trick up my sleeve you might not be familiar with.
You can transform your writing through the power of the growth mindset.
As a former English teacher, I am well-versed in how important the growth mindset is. Helping a student succeed through evidence-based psychological principles is powerful, to say the least. But you don’t have to be a teacher or a scholar to benefit from retraining your inner dialogue to change your mindset for the better.
“Our doubts are traitors,
and make us lose the good we oft might win,
by fearing to attempt.”
― William Shakespeare
Fixed vs. growth mindset
If you’re not familiar with the growth mindset, here it is in a nutshell. Our minds have two outputs: fixed vs. growth. In the fixed mindset, we believe that our personalities, creativity, talents, intellect, etc., are static and that we can never change them. A fixed mindset also avoids failure at all costs to reassure ourselves we are talented and skilled in something. Anything.
A growth mindset, on the other hand, does the exact opposite. A growth mindset means that you know your talents can be developed through hard work, study, dedication, or plain old grit and determination. Intelligence can be developed over time, even in adults.
Look at how much more you know now than you did even ten years ago. We’re always growing, always evolving. The point to is to keep building knowledge, honing our craft, and not become bound by what we believe to be our innate limitations.
When you embrace a growth mindset, even failure becomes a jumping-off point for challenging your abilities.
Keep learning and growing in your craft to break free of the bondage of self-doubt.
To take a look at fixed vs. growth mindset, here’s a simple explanation:
A fixed mindset:
Makes our intelligence feels static
Causes us give up easily
Makes us believe only innate talent leads to success (instead of hard work)
We see feedback as negative (or a personal assault) instead of constructive criticism
We feel threatened by others’ success instead of being inspired by it
We steer clear of challenges and focus on areas where we are confident in our ability to succeed.
The growth mindset, on the other hand:
Means intelligence can be developed
We persist despite failure
Our effort leads to success (it’s not all about talent)
We learn from criticism and apply it to improve our skills
We are inspired by others’ success
We embrace challenges with an open mind, knowing we might fail before we master them — and that’s ok.
Simple questions to help change your mindset
When I was teaching gifted elementary students, I used growth mindset posters (Star Wars themed, of course) to help remind students of how to shift their mindset when they were feeling frustrated. I always reminded my students when they were struggling (but their friends weren’t) that we are all in a different place, we learn and grow differently, and we need to honor where we are right now. The posters on my walls would suggest helpful positive phrases instead of negative ones that I could point to when my students needed a gentle reminder.
Some of these are incredibly simple, but the power of the growth mindset will transform your writing — and all areas of your life — if you let it.
Instead of thinking…
I can’t do this.
I’m terrible at this.
This is too hard.
They are better at this than me.
This isn’t great, but it’s good enough.
I give up.
Try these instead…
If I keep learning and trying, I’ll be able to do it.
What can I learn to get better at this skill?
If I practice, it will get easier.
What can I learn from them?
Is this my best work?
I need to try a different approach to succeed.
How to use the growth mindset as a writer
As writers, it’s all too easy to slide down the slippery slope of comparison, especially on social media. The next time you’re sitting down to work on your next chapter or craft a brilliant story but you’re feeling doubt, try printing out some growth mindset posters and hang them in your space. Our minds are what limit our potential, so let’s keep them open and flowing with creativity!
“Do. Or do not. There is no try.” -Master Yoda
Below are five tips on how you can use the power of the growth mindset to transform your writing, and why it is important to retrain your brain into this kind of thinking.
You will always keep learning.
Since the growth mindset teaches us to keep learning and trying even when we fail, we will always strive to be better writers. Your inner voice won’t say, “I’m terrible at this, I quit!” Instead, you’ll keep writing, reading, studying the craft, and studying other authors. You’ll never regret the time you spent doing so.
Time spent writing is never wasted, even if it’s trash. So keep hammering away at those keys!
A couple of years ago, I was feeling rather bored with poetry and loved reading flash and short fiction, and I had a desire to write it.
At first, I felt like I was terrible at writing prose and I had no good ideas. But after a lot of reading and studying the craft of flash fiction, and writing lots of garbage, I’ve had dozens of pieces published so far (on Medium and elsewhere), and this is only the beginning!
Read, study, learn. The time spent will be a great investment, trust me.
The quest for knowledge is always time well spent.
2. You’ll know that effort (and frustration) is a part of the growth process.
As writers, I think we can fall into the trap of thinking “If I’m not immediately good at a new skill, I must not be talented.” As a former teacher of gifted academics, I always had to reassure my students (and parents) that the struggle was actually a good thing because it means you’re being challenged and learning new things.
If everything came easily, we would never be challenged, and we would never grow as writers (or as people in general).
Does writing a novel feel uncomfortable? Is crafting a poem or short story out of your comfort zone? Great!
You know what that uncomfortable feeling is? Bravery. It takes bravery to try something new, especially if you’re not good at it right away. That feeling isn’t permanent, and you’ll work yourself out of that frustration zone with each new piece you write.
3. You’ll stop comparing yourself to others.
This is a big one, dear authors. Social media has made comparison a contagious disease, but a growth mindset is the cure. Instead of reading Philip K. Dick or Ursula K. LeGuin and lamenting that you’ll never be that good, remind yourself that these writers have years of experience on you.
So when we compare our writing to someone who has written dozens of novels and had years of experience, we’re comparing apples to oranges. There is only one person you should compare yourself to — and that is you!
Revisit your old writings and look at how much you’ve grown. Compete with yourself, and you’ll gradually improve your writing over time. There’s no rush. Flowers grow at their own pace, and so should you!
“The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.”
― Robert Hughes
4. Criticism will feel constructive.
In a fixed mindset, criticism feels like a personal attack because it feels like your abilities are being evaluated and falling short. With a growth mindset, you’ll realize feedback is essential to growing as a writer. Feedback isn’t inherently negative. It’s provided to improve your skills so you can explore your full potential.
Without feedback from my editors, readers, friends, family, and fiction critique partner, I feel my writing would have stagnated long ago. The feedback I receive is constructive and it helps me grow exponentially in my craft.
A critique partner will help you improve your writing, helping you squash that self-doubt monster in the process.
5. You’ll learn the art of self-compassion.
Self-doubt only kills our motivation and decreases taking pleasure in our writing. There have been months where I didn’t write at all because I was paralyzed by my own restrictive self-talk. All I could think of were potential mistakes that I would no doubt make, the rejections, and I felt like I didn’t have any unique ideas to write about.
How did I get over that? One, support from my family, who keeps me up when I’m down; two, giving myself grace on days when my depression or anxiety keep the negative self-talk on a constant loop in my mind; three, telling myself that I couldn’t get any rejections if I never wrote anything, and a rejection is at least proof that I tried!
And out of many rejections came many acceptance letters as well, and I wouldn’t have published anything at all if I had kept doubting my writing abilities.
Final thoughts
A growth mindset doesn’t happen overnight. As with any kind of training, it takes time and dedication. Allow yourself to make mistakes and have bad writing days.
What’s worse than a bad writing day? A day of not writing. That rejection email glaring at you from your inbox? It means you tried, and someone read your work. And just because one publication says no, doesn’t mean they all will (I submitted to three literary magazines before one of my favorite stories got published).
Keep writing. Keep moving forward. Don’t stagnate.
And retrain your brain to tell yourself: I’ve got this. No matter what.
H.R. Parker © 2024 All Rights Reserved. First appeared in The Fiction Writer’s Den, 2023.
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