The Screwtape Letters – C. S. Lewis (1942)
(Fictional correspondence between a senior tempter (devil) and his protégé, Wormwood).
As a child, I was brought up believing that if I just put my mind to something, worked harder than everyone else, and didn’t give-up then I could achieve everything. There was no room for second best, if I was not top of the class and came first in tests in all tests then, as far as my mother was concerned … I had failed.
There is however, as far as I am concerned a fine balance between encouraging people to achieve more than they think possible and having them think they can achieve things well out of their reach and have them fail. On the other hand, something more devastating than that is to quash all dreams and aspirations.
There is a grave danger that people will start to believe something if they are told it often enough, and by enough people.
For those in the community creative writing group that I run, I try very hard to encourage everyone to write, to write whatever they want, in the style they like and about things they want to write about. There is never anything that is intrinsically wrong with anything that people write. Editing is where the things like grammar, spelling, punctuation, layout, etc. are addressed, but even then, whatever I might say it is still their work to do with as they please.
Writing is subjective. My views on something will be totally different to what others see in a piece and not one of us has the monopoly on being right.