I'm fairly confident when it comes to my writing ability. In fact, it is one of the only things about myself I am confident in at all. The strange thing about it is, despite knowing that I am a good writer, whenever I post a new piece of work, I am paranoid that I've somehow "lost it" until I receive positive feedback on it. When I first started writing for the Bleacher Report, this was difficult for me because a lot of the feedback you receive as a sports writer is negative. It does not mean that you are no longer a good writer, or even that you are wrong about the topic. A lot of times it simply means that the only people dumb enough to disagree with me are the same ones that are dumb enough to be loud about it. This is not to say that I'm always right, its just that those who disagree with me in an intelligent manner I view as positive feedback because it allows me to enter into a discussion with the person and its usually rather productive.
I once heard from a best-selling author whose name currently escapes me (maybe Malcolm Gladwell) that writers have only a certain number of words in them and after they run out, all they can come with with is mindless gibberish. At some point, I became afraid that I would run out of words. So I guarded them. I decided not to write anything unless it was going to be absolute gold. I wanted everything I wrote to be the best thing you had ever read. At the very least I wanted it to be the best thing I'd ever written. Recently I realized that this is utterly moronic. Not the part about wanting everything I write to be the best you've ever read or the best I've ever written, I believe that's a great, although lofty thing to strive for. No, the idiotic part was guarding my words. If I died tomorrow, what difference would it make if I had more words left to write? I decided I would rather live a long life and at some point, run out of well-crafted words to write than I would die knowing I left some of them in the tank.
I am currently trying to become a professional writer. I've gotten some contacts from a friend of mine who works at a newspaper and I'm doing everything I currently can to try and make this happen. Who knows, maybe someday I will be a best-selling author, or maybe the high point of my writing career will have been being named the #2 Husker football writer for the Bleacher Report in May 2011. Either way, at the very least, I will know that even if I fail, it will not be because I did not try. Unfortunately, that's not something I've been able to say very often in my life but now is as good a time to start as any.
