Guest Bloggers

Guest Blogger Hal Zina Bennett – Transforming Your Inner Critics

Guest Blogger Hal Zina Bennett writes about our inner critics. Most of us writers are plagued by inner critics, those still small voices that speak from within, asking unsettling questions such as: “What makes you think you’re a writer?” Or, “This is drivel.” Or, the classic, “Don’t leave your day job.” Everyone has these inner critics, though some of us find their voices louder or more cutting than others. In their most insidious form, we feel these inner critics as our own self-judgments, not truths that we must accept. The author Storm Jameson put it well: “There is as much vanity in self-scourgings as in self-justification.” We write a few lines or pages that upon our review are “just terrible.” Instead of just rewriting or editing them, we point to them as evidence that we really can’t write. It’s difficult to accept that these inner critics, who stop us in…