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Writing Tips for the Self-Saboteur

Vivian McInerny
3 min readAug 23, 2021

Seven ways to stop beating yourself up on the page

Photo by John Olsson at Freeimages.com

“There will be more words written on Twitter in the next two years than contained in all books ever printed.” Christian Rudder, author of Dataclysm: Who We Are

I was doing research for a print magazine story when I stumbled upon the Rudder quote above. My writerly confidence immediately vanished into the ethers like a tweet without a hashtag.

Did the world really need more words? Specifically, did the world need my particular words? Of course not. Bookstores and libraries are filled with more words than can be read in several lifetimes, and the internet is evidently an almost infinite source of words profound and obscene and everything in between. So why bother? What is the point?

Sound familiar?

So many of us are our own evil editors. We don’t ask ourselves constructive questions to clarify our writing but dump doubt on the very act of writing. An existential crisis may be a teenage right of passage but for a writer it is a dead end down a dark alley.

Don’t get stuck with the rats and rubbish.

Below are tips to guide you back on the writing track.

Tip 1: Prepare to be a reject

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Vivian McInerny
Vivian McInerny

Written by Vivian McInerny

Career journalist, essayist, fiction writer, and life-long spirit-quester.

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