You should be writing. You are a beautiful writer.
Encouraging you to keep coming back to the page.
“You should be writing. You are a beautiful writer.”
A friend said this to me recently.
Not in a workshop.
Not after reading pages.
Just… said it.
And what caught me in that moment wasn’t the sentence.
It was how quickly I wanted to argue with it. To dismiss it. To wave it away.
Because, as you know, the instinct for us writers is immediate responses of:
I’ve been hitting a wall lately.
What I wrote this morning is a garbled mess.
I should be working on something more important.
This doesn’t count.
We disqualify and dismiss ourselves faster than anyone else ever could. And in reality, the “anyone else’s” want us to put those words on a page so they can read them.
But here’s what I’m seeing, over and over again:
The person who feels stuck… is still paying attention.
The one who thinks it’s messy… still showed up and wrote 738 words.
The one who “should” be doing something else… opened a blank page anyway.
That’s not avoidance.
That’s writing.
The line doesn’t land as pressure.
It lands as something more encouraging.
An internal yes that can’t be ignored as you wait in line at the grocery store.
A kind of lift in your heart that gives you momentum as you sit down at your desk.
Reading it, something in you just… chirps and says, “mmm-hmm, yes. I think I will.”
That’s the part to trust.
Not the output, because let’s be honest, the output isn’t always brilliance.
Not whether it’s good yet, most of the time it’s not, that’s what editing is for.
Not whether it’s the “right” project, things begin and end, but ideas live on.
Just trust that chirping response.
Because being a writer doesn’t start when the writing is perfect.
It starts when you stop dismissing the part of you that keeps returning to the page.
So if this feel true for you, don’t turn it into a question.
Turn it into a decision.
Write something today.
Even if it’s messy.
Even if it’s not the thing you think you should be writing.
Even if no one sees it.
Some sentences aren’t asking you to improve.
They’re asking you to stop interrupting.
You should be writing. You are a beautiful writer.
xo,
Licia