It is always nice when one’s writing skills are appreciated. However, sometimes it’s not as pleasant to receive praise for something that you feel was inferior. That’s the kind of guilt that writers experience. Thankfully, guilt can be a powerful motivational tool when used correctly. That’s what this article is going to help you with: finding the right words to use when you’re writing to describe that powerful feeling of guilt.
The Difference Between Guilt And Shame
Most people are familiar with the familiar feeling of shame. That feeling of shame that one experiences when they’ve done or said something wrong and feel that they deserve to be punished. Shame is a completely different feeling. Shame is that feeling of discomfort that one experiences when they don’t measure up to some type of standard that they’ve set for themselves. For example, if you think that you’re not good enough to be with these types of people, then you’ll feel shame towards them. That’s because you’re comparing yourself to a certain standard and feeling that you don’t measure up. Shame can be a bit tricky to describe, but it usually involves a combination of feelings such as:
- Guilty
- Proud
- Afraid
- Inevitable
- Dissatisfied
- Ashamed
- Embarrassed
- Wrong
- Dishonorable
- Inevitable
The key element to note in all of this is that guilt is a feeling that you have when you’ve done something wrong. Shame is a feeling that you have when you don’t measure up to some standard that you’ve set for yourself. There is a big difference between the two, and it’s something that you need to keep in mind if you want to be able to accurately describe the feeling of guilt that you’re going through. Once you realize that guilt is different from shame, everything else falls into place.
Why Do Writers Experience Guilt?
If you’re reading this, then it’s quite possible that you’re a writer yourself or have at least considered becoming one. If that’s the case, then you’re in luck because we’re going to tell you exactly why writers experience guilt. First of all, writing is a very private activity, and most writers wouldn’t want their writing to be public. That’s because they don’t want other people to think that what they wrote was bad or wrong. Imagine the humiliation that one would feel if their writing was somehow badly received by the audience. That’s the reason that most writers experience guilt when they’re writing as well. It’s that fear of humiliation that drives them to finish each and every one of their books.
How To Deal With Guilt In Creative Writing
When you’re writing a novel, book report, or creative nonfiction piece, there are certain things that you need to remember. First of all, your writing is likely to be very personal to you, so you need to be very careful about how you deal with it in public. If you want to write a book that’s going to be appreciated by the reading public, then you need to make sure that what you’ve written is of a high quality. That doesn’t mean that you need to be perfect, but it does mean that you need to take the time to ensure that every word and sentence is constructed correctly and that nothing is overlooked. When you follow this methodology, the end result is usually an impressive piece of work, one that is likely to be appreciated by both the reading public and the writer themselves.
There are other things that you can do to lessen the feeling of guilt that you experience when writing. For example, you can take a break every now and then and do something else with your time. If you find that you’re overly focused on your writing, then you can take a step back and give yourself a break. It’s important to have other pursuits in life that you enjoy, ones that don’t involve writing. This will help you to keep your sanity, as well as give you something to fall back on when you feel like your writing is taking too much time. Alternatively, there are some writers who actually find that writing in a group helps. Working with other writers can help to balance out the creative process, ensuring that every writer’s opinion is accounted for and that nothing is done in a half-baked manner. In other words, the more voices involved in the decision-making process, the less likely it is that there will be any bad blood or ill feeling towards any of the participants later on.
The Importance of Research
One of the things that can help to make your writing more authentic and less likely to be criticized is proper research. This is especially important if you’re writing historical fiction or creating an entirely fictitious setting for your work. The reason behind this is that during the research stage, you’ll usually find that there are a lot of gaps in your knowledge. These are the types of gaps that can be very difficult to fill in later on, when you’re writing, and they could potentially ruin the overall authenticity of your work if you don’t go back and try to fix them. For example, if you’re writing about the American Civil War, but you’ve never even been to the United States of America, then there’s a good chance that you’re going to struggle to accurately describe what it was like during that time period.
This is why proper research is so important. It allows you to account for every detail of the time period, giving your writing that extra little bit of authenticity which will hopefully make your work more appreciated by the reading public. There are a lot of resources available online which can help to make your research more efficient. For example, you can use online citation tools which can scan the web for relevant information, automatically creating the perfect bibliography for your work. Simply type in the information that you know about the topic, and the tool will do the rest. With a little bit of research, you can avoid many of the pitfalls that plague inexperienced writers.
Another important point to make about research is that it doesn’t have to stop once you’ve finished the draft of your book. Properly documented research will usually follow you wherever you go. For example, if you visit a Civil War battlefield or museum, then you’ll be able to see firsthand how certain aspects of the conflict differed from what you’d originally learned about it. This is why it’s important to do your research, even if you think that you know enough about the topic at hand. There are many times when even the best-researched books can be enhanced by a trip to the real-life location which they describe so vividly. This is why museums which exhibit historical artifacts are so important, giving us the chance to see things which have been taken out of their original context and to determine for ourselves whether or not they’re actually as good as the historians say they are.
Museums are also a great place to connect with other people who have a genuine interest in historical items. For example, if you visit a Civil War museum in Richmond, Virginia, then you’ll be able to see all of the different exhibits which describe that particular time in American history. However, if you visit the same museum a few hours later, then you’ll see an entirely different set of exhibits, ones which focus on the genocide which took place during that era. In other words, by connecting with other people who have an interest in history, you’re sure to learn a lot, even if you don’t consider yourself to be a particularly serious enthusiast.
Avoiding Pitfalls
In the same way that proper research is important, so too is avoiding pitfalls when writing. These are the types of writing sins which can make your work easily recognizable as being a total work of fiction. For example, it’s easy to fall into the trap of describing things in too much detail. This is a common mistake which novice writers often make, thinking that if they give everything too much detail then it will be easier for the reader to visualize what’s going on. However, this often leads to the opposite effect. It makes the writing much more obvious, because everything is new and nothing is familiar. In other words, the reader is much more likely to catch on at the end that this is in fact a made-up story, crafted merely for the purpose of entertainment, rather than a piece of history or an actual account of something that happened.