Hello and welcome to The Confident Creative Club!

Welcome…

I’d like to offer you all the warmest of welcomes. Pull up a seat, grab a cuppa and a biscuit and let’s start making some real progress towards your creative goals.

You are a Founding Member. Which means your subscription charge will never change. It means you can shape the Club with any ideas you have. And it means you’ll be making progress sooner rather than later. I want to say a HUGE thank you for taking a chance and trusting me with this Club.

I have so many ideas and exciting possibilities and cannot wait to get started. Bear with as the site is still in its infancy. But exciting things will be coming.

What to do first

I understand that it might be overwhelming as you look through this site. So I thought I’d list what to do in the beginning:

1. Request to join The Confident Creative Club on Instagram.

2. Make a note of the events coming up. I’d love to know any thoughts you have on potential workshop topics, Coffee Chat questions and so on.

3. I’ll email you when I add anything of significance to this site.

About Helen

Some of you already know me. Some of you may only have discovered me recently. So I thought it might be a good idea to share a little more about me and, hopefully, my story will inspire you and demonstrate that if you’re unconfident and have no self-belief it doesn’t mean that you can’t do this creative thing.

My name is Helen Redfern and I live in the middle of England with my husband and two children. My handle used to be A Bookish Baker but I realised I was hiding behind this so changed to Helen Redfern Writer a couple of years ago.

I started writing when I was pregnant with my son over seventeen years ago. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing but opened Microsoft Word and starting writing a story loosely based on my life: a pregnant woman organising her wedding.

After the birth we moved house and I struggled with post-natal depression and PTSD from a difficult birth. It was a couple of years before I started writing again and when I did I went back to the same story and couldn’t get any further than the third chapter. I would write and re-write it over and over again.

On one of my regular trips to the bookshop with my son just to get out of the house, I picked up a book by a British author. I read it and thought (rather arrogantly, perhaps) I could do this. I did an Internet search on the author and discovered she had a blog. I never knew blogs were a thing. It was all very new.

I discovered she was starting a novel ‘race’ with other writers - some published, some not. A race to finish the first draft of their novel. This, I thought, was just what I needed. But the thought of emailing a published author was terrifying and I debated this internally for days. I was anxious, terrified, a little embarrassed and was fighting the inner monologue of ‘who do you think you are requesting to join a writing group?’ But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Finally, after becoming extremely irritated with myself, I took the plunge and wrote the email. When she wrote back, in a lovely welcoming way, she insisted I created a blog. That was, after all, how we were all going to keep track of each other and support the other members of the group (this was pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter). I nearly bottled it. I was so close to saying ‘thanks but that’s not for me’.

Instead I created a blog. And I’ve never regretted it.

It changed my life.

Since then I have written lots of blogs. I’ve written for book and writing websites, written for a writing magazine, written for The Huffington Post, and had my writing published in an anthology.

And I was spotted and signed up to a literary agent. (This is a whole other story but I’m no longer with her now.)

Throughout the sixteen years I’ve been writing online I have been battling with a lack of confidence. This manifested itself as procrastination, self-sabotage, and being distracted by the shiny things the internet can offer.

I even had an email from a publisher asking to look at my fiction but I was TOO SCARED TO SEND IT TO HER. I know, right.

In the last few years I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with myself. I was so busy during the day but had nothing to show for it. I was focusing on short term tasks and ignoring long term projects.

This all culminated in me going to an Instagram Influencer event to promote an author’s book and I thought, why am I doing this? Why am I promoting someone else’s work instead of writing my own books?

This was a changing point. I started to think carefully about my projects and managing my time. Despite doing this I was still focusing on the wrong things, like, for example, creating a YouTube Channel instead of writing.

It wasn’t until the pandemic hit last year that I discovered my Creative Purpose. And once I discovered that - everything changed.

I became purposeful, I had goals. I had projects that aligned with my purpose and got me closer towards my goals. I was no longer following someone else’s creative path but focusing on my own. And I put writing at the centre of everything I do.

I cannot tell you how liberating this was. How exciting. How I felt I was doing something meaningful. Rather than just chasing the shiny.

After sixteen years I finally feel like I’m getting somewhere. I have finally found my ‘thing’. And I couldn’t be happier.

This has given me confidence. It’s made me aware of when I’m self-sabotaging. I have more self-belief. And I have clarity and focus.

Don’t get me wrong. I still feel fear. I still get terrified. But I’m pushing forward with my creative dreams despite this. And I’d love to help you do this, too.

To be continued…