Hello, friends!  Welcome to this month’s meeting of the Insecure Writers’ Support Group, a blog hop created by Alex J. Cavanaugh and co-hosted this month by Shannon Lawrence, Olga Godim, Jean Davis, and Jacqui Murray.  Are you a writer?  Do you feel insecure?  Well, then this is the support group for you!  Click here to learn more and to see a list of participating blogs.

Each month, IWSG asks members a question.  Answering the monthly question is not required.  It’s totally optional, which is good news for me, because there’s a different question plaguing my thoughts today.  A different question that keeps getting in the way of writing.  It’s a question that my inner critic keeps asking in snide, Smeagol-like whispers:

You’re no scientist.  You don’t work for NASA.  What gives you the right to blog about space exploration?

And I admit, my inner critic has a point.  I’m a huge fan of space exploration, and I probably do know more about space than the average person.  But still, I’m a long way away from being a true expert.  Plenty of others can speak with greater authority about space than I can.  Some of my readers know more about space than I do.

However, when my inner critic asks these sort of questions—questions like “What right do you have to blog about space?”—I think my inner critic misses the whole point of my blog.  I love space.  I’ve committed myself to learning as much as I can about space, and I believe that learning is a three step process:

• Passive learning, which is the passive consumption of information from books, online lectures, etc.
• Active learning, which means (among other things) reexplaining the information you’ve learned in your own words.
• Receiving feedback, which involves people correcting your mistakes, asking interesting questions, suggesting topics for future research, etc.

From time to time, my inner critic reminds me that I’m not an astrobiologist, not a planetary scientist, not an aerospace engineer, and shames me into not writing.  But that doesn’t just shut down writing.  It shuts down my whole learning process.  If I don’t do my blogging, how will I learn?

Is that answer enough to silence my inner critic?  Actually, it is.  Inner critics are cowards.  They don’t know what to do when you talk back to them, they don’t know what to say when you stand up for yourself.  Much of what I said in today’s post is specific to my own writing and my own issues with my own inner critic.  But if your inner critic has been asking snide questions and shaming you into not writing, then I hope you’ll start talking back like I did.  It really works.