The film critic Anthony Lane once said every movie he reviewed was its own production, Lane's prose putting on a show to entertain readers.

I love that.

I went searching for inspiration this week as I wrote Book No. 3 and found it in a favorite source, George Packer's examination of Richard Holbrooke, Our Man.

You would not think a biography of a diplomat could be so fun on the page.

In one of my favorite passages, Packer describes how Holbrooke and other young men like him stationed in Vietnam—Kennedy's Best and Brightest—read Graham Greene's The Quiet American and drew the wrong conclusions from the novel.

Packer says Greene suspected they would. Greene loathed Americans because, as Packer writes, "our bathrooms were air conditioned and our women deodorized and we were too shallow to know good and evil."

The bathroom and deodorized bits will always be funny. And, again, the line appears in a book about a diplomat.

You can do anything you want on the page. Trust yourself.

I don't know if it's because of the grammarians they encountered as teachers or the aspiration to write something as exalted as The Gospels, but too many writers are too serious on the page. Their prose is an unwavering dedication to grim sobriety.

And we wonder why more people don't read.

Again, if Anthony Lane's film criticism or George Packer's books teach us anything, it's that there are no rules. Be loud or quiet, sinful or transcendent as a writer.

Mostly be you, through and through, every page, every word.

How to do that comes down to the clarity of your ideas and the specificity of your prose, sure, but, really, at bottom, it comes down to confidence.

Believing you can say whatever you want: That's the hard thing.

It took me the better part of 15 years to believe it myself.

It's also what I encounter most often in the writers I consult and teach. People who don't believe they can say what they wish to.

If that's you—and I suspect it is; the doubt is within us all—the best way to convince you otherwise is to show you the writers who do as they please and whenever they want.

The liberated, transgressive, and very best sort of writers.

I made the below video more than a year ago but because the lack of faith in oneself comes up so often—I doubted myself this week, as did four writers I spoke with—the problem can only be answered by showing you the solution yet again.

If you want confidence, start by reading the confident writers who've come before you.

This video tip is a sampler.