Your job is to figure out what’s getting in way of doing that.

If you’re anything like me, behind worries about time and motivation, a big part of obstacle is some form of that old chestnut, fear of failure.

‘What if it’s not good enough?’ we worry, and tinker with piece a bit longer instead of sending it out into world to be judged. ‘I’m not enough of an expert to tell people how to do things,’ we say, and then fume when someone else with even less experience lands prestigious ‘Question and Answer’ column.

For most of us, difference between us and those hugely successful and productive writers is not ability. It’s confidence. It’s having guts to pitch for a tricky, but rewarding job, knowing that you’ve always delivered before, and you’ll find a way to do so this time. It’s taking plunge and sending your synopsis and sample chapters off to a handful of agents, and then, if those come back, to another dozen or so for good measure. It’s being able to withstand any individual failure because you know it’s not end of everything, just an inevitable setback on road to ultimate success.

This sort of confidence doesn’t appear overnight, but there are some easy tricks you can use to move yourself along.

Don’t worry about starting small – most successful writers do. Give yourself a goal that’s just a little bit ahead of where you are now – perhaps a number of submissions per week or month, a competition to enter or a new market to pitch to. Reward yourself when you get there, and keep a record of your successes to cheer yourself up when things are going less well. And each time you reach a goal, pick a new one that’s just a bit further along.

Just like everything else you do regularly, writing success soon becomes a habit, and before long people will be looking at you and wondering how you do it!

A few carefully chosen images, with suitable captions, can go a long way toward preventing that. When I saw that junior programmer was stripping away all screen capture images, I cautioned him against that. “These images may not be strictly necessary,” I said, “but they help clarify a lot of details. For one thing, they show user exactly which button to push, or which window to select. This makes instructions much easier to understand, and reduces likelihood of a human error.” To this day, I wish that he had heeded my warning.

Were users intelligent enough to understand manual, as he claimed? Certainly—but intelligence is no guarantee against human error. Could images have been construed as talking down to user? Perhaps—but in my experience, sophisticated users seldom respond that way. Rather, most of them seem to understand value that these images bring to table. Perhaps it’s because most of them know what it’s like to be frazzled and pressed for time, and how easily important details can be lost in text.

So remember—a picture paints a thousand words, and a single screen capture can be worth more than a dozen pages of text. It’s a lesson that’s worth learning.