How to Find Your Courage as an Author

Fear is one of the biggest enemies of writers. It ruins our writing and can destroy our marketing. That’s why courage is so important. Today, we’re going to talk about how to find your courage as an author.

How Fear Ruins Writing

Fear Ruins Your Output

Fear can keep you from starting or finishing your manuscript. Writing takes courage. The old saying goes that writing is sitting in front of a typewriter and bleeding. That process is painful and scary. If we want to write and actually put words on the page, we must have courage.

Fear Damages Your Craft

But fear can also damage our craft. A writer who’s afraid of offending someone often fills her sentences with qualifiers and softens her language until her point gets lost. Her short, punchy sentences become watered down. Or she’s so afraid of what her editor will think that she stops writing for her reader and starts writing for her editor.

An editor’s job is to help you thrill your reader. When fear shifts your focus from your reader to your editor, your writing becomes unclear, vague, and timid. You stop taking firm stances, and your words lose power. That kind of writing is ineffective, and no one wants to read it. It takes courage to say what you mean.

Fear Masquerades as Perfection

Fear often disguises itself as perfectionism. Perfectionism is just fear in fancy clothing: fear of criticism, fear of failure, fear of being judged. The truth is, you’re not perfect. You have flaws, and so does your writing. It will never be perfect.

Perfection often becomes the enemy of done. If you want to change the world, you have to share your writing with the world, which means putting out something imperfect. That doesn’t mean we stop striving for excellence, but excellence isn’t the same as perfection.

I define excellence as “quality done quickly.” Someone excellent at their craft produces high-quality work efficiently because they’ve done it before and learned through repetition. As you grow more comfortable as a writer and learn to face your fears (what Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art calls “the resistance”), you’ll write faster. Faster writing leads to more books, more sales, more income, and more impact.

If you write slowly out of fear or perfectionism, you’ll have less of all those things. Learning to write courageously helps you overcome perfectionism and move forward.

How Fear Ruins Our Marketing

Fear also damages your marketing. It’s difficult to put yourself out there as the leader of your idea. You will face criticism. I know this firsthand.

When I wrote the blog post “Why Courtship Is Fundamentally Flawed,” it reached over a million views in a month. But it also drew hundreds of blog posts and thousands of social media comments criticizing me. Some even wished me dead. My mother cried reading some of those comments.

Around that time, I opened a fortune cookie that said, “He who gets the credit gets the blame.” I kept that message in my wallet as a reminder that leadership comes with a cost. Taking a stand invites pushback, but it’s worth it. That post changed lives and even influenced Joshua Harris to rethink his views on dating and courtship.

Do you have what it takes to lead as an author?

Writing is an act of leadership. As a novelist, you lead readers into new worlds and stories. As a nonfiction writer, you lead readers into new ways of thinking. Writing is leadership, and leadership requires courage.

People criticize leaders. You’ve probably criticized leaders yourself—your boss, your pastor, or political leaders. It’s human nature. So if you want to lead as a writer, you need courage. Courage to take a stand, to share your message, and to keep leading even when people complain.

One way I can tell if someone is ready to be an author is whether they’re willing to lead. If they’re hiding, they may not be ready. They might make a great ghostwriter by quietly helping someone else lead, but if they want their own name on the book, they need courage.

Being an author means risking criticism and one-star reviews. Not everyone will praise you. Some will misunderstand or attack you, but that’s part of leadership.

Fear Masquerades as Humility

In marketing, fear doesn’t disguise itself as perfectionism; it disguises itself as humility.

Writers often say, “I don’t want to talk about myself. I just want to focus on my message.” They tell themselves it’s not about money or fame. But even as they speak, the conversation is still centered on themselves.

So the question we must face as Christian authors is this: When is it okay to promote yourself and your writing?

When is it okay to promote yourself as an author?

Let me answer that with a true story.

In Australia, a doctor named Barry Marshall challenged a long-standing medical belief. For decades, doctors taught that ulcers were caused by stress, greasy food, and alcohol. But Dr. Marshall noticed a pattern among his patients and began to suspect that bacteria—not stress—were to blame.

He proposed testing his theory on pigs, but couldn’t reproduce the results. When he asked for permission to do human trials, the medical community rejected him. Everyone said he was wrong.

So, alone in his lab, Dr. Marshall did something extraordinary. He drank a broth containing billions of H. pylori bacteria. Within three days, he developed a painful ulcer. Then, after taking a strong course of antibiotics, he cured it.

He had proven both the cause and the cure for ulcers. His discovery changed medicine.

Now imagine if Dr. Marshall had said, “I don’t want people to think I’m bragging. I’ll just keep this to myself.” That would have been wrong. He had a responsibility to share the truth. He had to promote his findings, not for his ego, but for the good of others.

As authors, we have the same responsibility. If God has given you a message, you have an obligation to share it. Promoting your book isn’t about pride; it’s about obedience. It’s about serving others with the truth you’ve discovered.

What is false humility?

False humility is just another form of pride. As Rick Warren once said, humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking about yourself less.

Guess who wrote the words, “Now Moses was very humble, more humble than any other person on earth”? It was Moses himself.

If you think humility is at odds with stating the truth, then you either don’t know the truth or you don’t understand humility.

How do you find your courage?

The answer is love. It may sound cliché, but perfect love casts out all fear. The more you love your reader, the more courage you will have.

Writing and marketing may never stop being scary for you, and that’s okay. Courage isn’t the absence of fear; it’s the choice to act rightly even when you feel terrified.

You can’t be courageous unless you’re afraid. Boldness is the absence of fear, and it often comes from ignorance of the risk. It’s easy to be bold when you don’t realize the dangers or the pushback you might face.

But as you walk this path, you’ll discover that not everyone is kind or encouraging. You’ll realize how challenging the writing journey can be. The journey of leadership and taking a stand is challenging.

As Christians, we have an adversary who seeks to kill, steal, and destroy. But we also have the living God within us, and He is stronger. He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world.

If you love your reader and your writing will help her, then you already have everything you need. God has given you all you need to do what He has called you to do.

What kind of authors is God calling us to be?

Remember, the world is broken. But as Christians, we hold the truth of Christ that the world desperately needs.

Publishers want to partner with authors who are willing to face that brokenness and write the truth, even when the truth is painful. I want to work with authors who will speak truth to power, yet still be motivated by love.

Now, to be clear, your writing doesn’t have to be controversial or provocative to advance the kingdom. But you should want to be an author with the courage to write clearly and the courage to promote your books publicly.

I prefer working with authors who are willing to tackle today’s difficult and controversial topics. I’m looking for authors who have put themselves out there before and who have a passion for truth in their writing.

What ever happened to Dr. Barry Marshall?

And what about the rest of Dr. Barry Marshall’s story?

He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2005. Every medical textbook has since been rewritten. Our entire understanding of ulcers has changed.

Millions of people who were once given the wrong treatment have now been cured, thanks to the risk Dr. Marshall took. He drank the bacteria and boldly shared his findings with the world, even when everyone told him he was crazy.

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