For about three years now, I have been writing poetry. It was not until my junior year in high school that I developed an interest, love, and skill for writing poetry. Back in elementary school, I love to write stories. I would write stories on post-it notes and anywhere I could. Yet when I had to write a limerick  for an assignment, I could not wrap my head around poetry. I had a very hard time figuring out how to rhyme words and have the words make sense. I eventually tossed the paper with the attempted limerick in the trash. I did not try my hand at poetry again until several years later. Many years later in my freshman year of high school, my English teacher gave my class a poetry project as an assignment. I still remember my limerick assignment and was afraid of doing the poetry. For the project, we had to analyze a poem and write a response to it. I choose to respond to Robert Frost's poem Fire and Ice. I also wrote my own poem first. I become really excited when writing the poem. Two years later, I started writing poetry, as a hobby and for fun. To learn how good or bad my poems were, I handed them in to some magazines and contests. I won second place in the North Carolina Poetry Society's Sherry Pruitt Award Contest with a poem called The Ocean, and had my two poems published as high merit   poems. I have continued to write poetry, and have even self-published three collections of poetry in both print and e-book formats, which can be found at my store on Lulu. Now, I love writing poetry, but I don't hate writing short stories. I just find it more difficult and not my style of writing, even though I still write short stories occasionally. How did the author increase his confidence in writing poetry?
He wrote a lot of poems and asked advice from his teacher He published three collections of poetry by himself He submitted his poems to magazines contests He gave up writing stories and only wrote poetry