You started your book on fire. Now you sit down to write and feel blank – or worse, you’ve started to feel disenchanted by your own story.
That’s the mid-draft slump. And if you’re in it, you know it doesn’t just make you doubt your book. It makes you doubt yourself.
In this episode, I break down why writers lose faith in their stories mid-draft, and why the problem is almost never the story itself. You’ll learn the three shifts that will get you back in the room with your work.
This isn’t a pep talk. It’s a reorientation — one that puts you back in control of the one thing that was always yours: your experience of writing this book.
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Episode At A Glance
[01:00]The Emotional Cost Of Doubting Your Story
You start your book with hope, energy, and momentum. The story feels vivid in your head. You feel it down to your bones. You’re truly excited about your story. And the writing feels easy.
And then around month three or month six — something shifts. The story that felt vivid and alive starts to feel flat. You’re bored with your own pages.
And that boredom doesn’t stay contained to the story – it bleeds into something darker.
“If I’m bored with my own story, maybe the story isn’t good enough. And if the story isn’t good enough, maybe I’m not good enough to write it.”
That’s the spiral. Lack of faith in the story becomes lack of faith in yourself.
Losing faith in your story, or in yourself as a writer, is not a character flaw. And it doesn’t mean you’re not a real writer. It’s a signal that you’re hyper-focused on the wrong thing.
Here are 3 ways to believe in your book again.
[04:50] 1. Make the Process the Reward
At some point in your writing process, you stopped being curious about your story and started worrying about its future.
You stopped experimenting — trying things, following instincts, discovering what the story wanted to be — and started calculating.
Will this work? Will readers like this? Is this good enough?
And the moment you tied your enjoyment to the outcome, you handed it to forces completely outside your control.
But no beta reader’s opinion, no agent rejection, no feedback notes can disqualify you from your own enjoyment of the writing process. That enjoyment is yours. It belongs to you. But only if you keep it.
[08:01] 2. Focus on the Work, Not the Outcome
Most of us come to the page asking: will this be good enough? Will people like it? Will it sell? Those are questions about what we need from the work — validation, approval, proof that we belong here.
The work doesn’t care about any of that. The work just needs you to show up and serve it.
Writers who stay lit up are the ones who have fallen in love with the pursuit. Not the destination.
The outcome is a destination. The pursuit is where you actually live. And fulfillment — real fulfillment — comes from the pursuit.
[09:27] 3. Deepen Your Craft
The writers who sustain their excitement the longest are not the ones with the most discipline. They’re not the ones with the strictest schedules or the highest word count goals. They’re the ones who are always learning something inside their work.
One of the most powerful ways to do that is to read like a writer. Not for pleasure, not to escape, but with laser-focused attention on one craft element at a time.
Doug Glover once said that literature is an encyclopedia of technique. Every novel or memoir you read is a masterclass if you know what to look for.
Links Mentioned In This Episode
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