ANDRE BEGIN

Throughout my 33 year career as a public servant, I had my ups and downs in confidence levels. Who doesn’t?

But now, at a time when writing is the way I choose to live out my retirement dreams, something happened.

Confidence.

Oodles of it.

Confidence on a scale I’d rarely seen before.

Confidence for a guy who often second guessed himself, who struggled with imposter syndrome and who often worried about… well… too many things to list here.

But in the world of writing, below the surface, I sort of knew.

I’m not saying that I am the best writer in the world. I know I still have so much to learn after having pivoted from technical writing to fiction.
To achieve that, I am indeed actively listening, reading and learning from any materials that I can get my hands on.

However, whenever I sit at my desk and pick up one of my writing projects, the ideas just flow.

Why is that?

I’ll be the first to say that the confidence I feel now didn’t happen overnight. Far from it. It comes from decades of preparation, practice, consistency and an open mind toward self-improvement.

Experience

During my public service career, writing was a constant. I was entrusted with the task of writing and editing thousands of pages of documents. I swear, “thousands” is no exaggeration! This enabled me to develop strong reflexes in writing, editing and in reformulation.

And with the short time frames offered to complete many of those assignments, I had to push past any indecision about what to say or how to say it, a skill that remains with me today.

Great teachers

Over that time, I worked with amazing mentors and coaches to whom I am forever grateful. They were the teachers whose impeccable writing skills made them great role models for me. In working with them, they challenged me and helped me to refine my skills in structure, logic and flow.

Blogging in my spare time

Over the last ten years, I was able to stretch my writing skills in a different direction, by publishing a new article each week for my WordPress blog.

In doing so, I was able to write on a variety of subjects, while looking at things from the lighter side of life, sometimes even going as far as dipping my toe into the pool as a humourist.

A system for capturing ideas

Meanwhile, my subconscious started pitching ideas to me that didn’t have a natural home at work nor in the blog. With free time in short supply, I vowed to return to them when I was available to truly do them justice. As a result, I developed a system for capturing, storing and retrieving ideas, a system that continues to evolve to this day.

With countless journal pages, index cards and electronic notes accumulated over the years, I now have a nearly bottomless pit of ideas for stories, characters and situations, supported by solid purpose and motivation.

With no shortage of material to work from, I am now able to join together these puzzle pieces and to breathe life into the stories that have been percolating in my subconscious.

Life lesson: Timing is everything

Over the span of my career, I have seen great ideas placed on the backburner for any number of reasons. A given idea can be fantastic, but whether due to budgets, staffing or competing priorities, it sometimes has to wait.

What a great life lesson to an aspiring writer… we can’t dictate the right time for a masterpiece to be published. It’s about preparation meeting opportunity. We just need to continue writing, building our portfolio and to not put all of our eggs in one basket.

For that reason, I feel I am prepared mentally for the business side of writing, where a story might be solid, but the timing or circumstances might not be right, resulting in a rejection. That’s OK to me… I just need to keep writing.

The long game of writing

In writing, there are no guarantees and nothing is certain. What we do know is that the creative process and the publishing process require time and patience.

Writing is a long game that requires nerves of steel.

After having waited three decades to fully commit myself to creative writing, a journey that offered me the best on-the-job training along the way, it is safe to conclude that patience is there.

Just enough positive reinforcement

Over the years, I was most fortunate in having received just enough positive feedback for my written work to make me believe that I had something worth building on. It wasn’t enough to inflate my ego, but it was just enough to convince me that of the things I might be good at (and that I enjoyed doing), this was my thing.

For these reasons, when I sit behind the computer, with this preparation behind me, there is very little idle time or fear of the blank page.

Maybe it’s something I learned at the office, but the process of taking a product from an idea to a final version, with all of its twists and turns along the way, is now second nature to me. What is there to fear?

When combining all of these factors, I seem to have found a sense of confidence that I can’t say I ever felt before.

I don’t say any of this from a sense of arrogance. It’s just that I am quite surprised by the contrast in confidence I felt when working for others as opposed the confidence I feel now as my own boss in this “factory of words”.

I know my voice, I know my intention and I have a strong sense of direction. When writing for others, I didn’t always have that.

Do I still have days when confidence isn’t as strong? Of course I do. Selling myself does not come naturally.

I recently tripped on my own tongue and stumbled badly when telling our local librarian about my writing. My informal pitch was bad! I hope that over time, I get the hang of self-promotion without looking flushed or breaking out in hives.

But when I am at the computer, I cannot help but feel that writing is what I was meant to do and what I have been preparing for my whole life.
Why shouldn’t I feel confident?

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Sincere thanks for reading!
Have a great day,
André