Faith

This week is going to be three of my favorite topics I've ever discussed on this blog. Three words that mean a great deal to me, that resonate within me, and that I crave and strive for with the deepest of passions.

Today,

Faith

To be perfectly honest, faith is a big part of my life. But faith is also something that every writer needs, in my opinion, for a few simple reasons. 

1. Faith keeps us from giving up on ourselves

Writers need to have faith in themselves, in their ability to sit down and craft a story. Without that, we wouldn't actually be writers. We would be pretenders, people who like the idea of writing but don't actually know how to do it. 

Faith is the tool that keeps us going, that keeps us believing in ourselves and keeps us working to hone our abilities into the sharpest that they can possibly be. 

Lose faith in yourself, and you lose that art.

2. Faith keeps us from giving up on our stories

Truth be told, some stories are just plain hard to write. The one I'm writing now, for instance, has taken me three tries to get more than five chapters into. But I always had faith that it was going to come, that there was going to be something beautiful there. 

If we lose faith in our stories, we lose the will to write them at all.

3. Faith helps us push on when others would push us down

I cannot count the number of writers I've spoken to whose family hates that they've decided to take the whole of their life and devote it to writing. To many people, writing is a dead end job that will never pay well. To a writer, writing is the dream job. It's what we could spend every hour of every day doing. 

Faith is what keeps us pushing toward that, even when our own family members would try to push us down.

4. Faith empowers us to go against the grain, to do what our hearts desire

Writers, as a group, tend to have a love for going against the norm. We don't like to be seen as average people who do average things. We're not normal, and we like it. We have faith in that, and in where it can take us. 

Holding onto that faith, keeping our eyes on the prize, it what allows us to follow our heart's desire. Letting go of that would be... detrimental, for lack of a better word. 

Faith. Some people think it's a dirty word that's only used for religions, but now you know -- it's for writers too, and we'd better not let it go. 

[love]

{Rani}