By the time the doorbell rings, I’ve assembled the apple crisp in the pan, the kitchen table is cleared and cleaned, and the radiator sends up cozy waves of warmth. My friend Annabel and I are trying something new today. We’re using each other’s company to forward our creative dreams.

The quest for a unique style can tie a writer in knots until nothing’s being written. Why write if the output is boring or is a copy of someone else’s style or is something anyone could have written? If there’s not enough pizzazz to the words, how likely are we to reel someone in?

When the thing you want to create resists the birthing process, consider cheating. I don’t mean copying someone else’s work and calling it your own, or forcing yourself into territory that’s unnatural for you. Instead, get proactive by enlisting the concept of the muse—your personal source of creative inspiration.

If you struggle to share your genuine self in your writing, you’re not alone. When I worked as a managing editor at a publishing company specializing in self-help books, I witnessed firsthand the internal conflict authors confronted as they tried to zero in on their messages.

I was minding my own business recently when someone close to me called me ignorant. I’d lapsed into a daze, slipped up, made a mistake, forgotten something important—because I’d been distracted by something more interesting. I’d chosen wonder over logic.

We run into trouble with writing and creating when we consider a project so important it triggers the specter of failure. We yearn for the powerful result, the creation that changes someone or shifts something. But the I’m not good enough alarm sounds and here come the old bastard thoughts.

Deep in the suburbs north of Atlanta, in a nice house on a cul-de-sac, I sat next to a young man in his dad’s office above the garage. Edward’s parents had asked me to talk with him about his struggle with writing. He seemed nervous but willing.

We often use the verb to write as if it’s one action, but writing is a multi-stage process that includes daydreaming, thinking, collecting, deciding, polishing, and other tasks and sub-tasks. We might not be naturally awesome at every single stage of the process—nor must we be.

Confidence includes an element of trust. Being confident about writing has to do with trusting or relying on one’s ability to write. As a goal, that’s rather vague and unhelpful. What’s missing is the acknowledgment that writing is something we figure out how to do every time we do it.

What’s the point of writing anything? Hasn’t everything (and then some) already been said? Go ahead, think of something you want to write about and then search for it on Google. How many zeros are there in the number of results that came up? This could be depressing. But it’s not. Those zeroes aren’t the story.