Novel Ideas

Sticky labels

Time to rip off the glue, says Lynn Hackles

I talked about labels in the November issue. Here are some more labels you might think apply to you.

Lazy is a label. Can’t is another. No good is a label too. We are what we believe ourselves to be.

Labels can stick. My mother called me lazy and for years I believed her. Looking back, it’s clear that lazy meant sitting around reading. It must have been difficult for my mother to see me like that when she was always rushing about.

There are lots of sticky labels out there and they may be affecting your writing. Have you ever labelled yourself by saying, ‘I’m not good enough.’ Perhaps you did this when you were thinking about writing a novel or you’d written a story and were too afraid to send it out into the world.

‘I can’t’ is another. A wonderful teacher when I was ten years old always used to tell the class there’s no such word as can’t. Because she was a teacher, I believed her. It was the day I ran downhill flapping my arms, trying to fly that the realisation dawned that she could be wrong about a few things. I definitely couldn’t fly. When I tackled her, the teacher gently explained that we weren’t built to fly because we didn’t have wings but she told me I could write and I believed her.

Maybe the hardest thing about being a writer is learning to believe in yourself. Will I ever get published? Is my writing rubbish? Am I wasting my time? Is this any good? One way to overcome this is to ask yourself who told you that you were lazy, no good, whatever? Do you believe them now? Are you going to allow that label to stick to you? That’s your choice.