Know What Your Weaknesses Are

I have been thinking lately about weaknesses and how they help us with strength. A weakness can help us see into ourselves faster than any compliment, but the trick is to actually want to take a look.

When it comes to our writing, we hope that our writing is perfect and that everyone will love it, but the opposite is probably true. Even those best sellers don't have everyone on the planet scrambling to get a copy.

And that brings me to something.

My work. Does everyone love it or even like it?

No, and I continually have to come to terms with that.

Are my books always understood or appreciated?

No. Sometimes there's some loathing involved.



With writing comes growth
Photo by: Richard Step

Does that make me want to quit?

Sometimes. But as I've said in previous posts, that's not something I'm going to do. Perhaps a particular reader has no sense at all when it comes to understanding what I write, but maybe they do, and maybe they can help me with the weakness that they see and I can eventually make the weakness a strength.

I tell writers all of the time. "If you're good at dialogue, you probably struggle with setting," and usually this is true.

As a writer, we can't be good at everything at the same time; what we can do is to see our weaknesses and work on perfecting them for our next endeavor. We need to have the courage to see what doesn't work and improve upon it and the sense to know when something is already working, though some readers might not appreciate it.