The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize.
― Robert Hughes
Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.
― Suzy Kassem
I don't believe anyone ever suspects how completely unsure I am of my work and myself and what tortures of self-doubting the doubt of others has always given me.
― Tennessee Williams
Wow. I wasn’t so sure of my post topic (ha! self-doubt at its finest), but when I started searching for quotes I was amazed at how many there were, and by a lot famous authors, too! It’s kind of comforting to know I’m not alone.
Early in the week I started going through my poetry to ferret out poems for a poetry reading I was to participate in on Thursday night. I read poem after poem and I hated them all. They were too amateurish, or depressing, or cliché, or just plain sucked. I had no business subjecting an unwitting audience to such drivel.
They weren’t really as bad as I thought, of course, it was just that niggling voice of self-doubt chipping away at my self-esteem. I read through them again, copy/pasted about 50 of the most promising ones into a folder, read them again and again, weeding some out each time. By the time I had it down to ten poems, I had started to like what I was reading again.
Self-doubt can arise from a fear, low self-esteem, a lack of confidence, or a combination of these things. It takes the form of a voice inside you that tells you aren’t good enough, you’ll never be published. Self-doubt can be an impediment to creativity and lead to writer’s block, and/or feelings of unworthiness.
But the thing is, almost every author suffers from self-doubt at one time or another, even famous ones:
Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.
― William Shakespeare
I'm afraid of failing at whatever story I'm writing—that it won't come up for me, or that I won't be able to finish it.
—Stephen King
Each day is like an enormous rock that I'm trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I'll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum. I'm very deeply inculcated with a sense of failure for some reason. And I'm drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I'm sympathetic with it I think, because I feel I'm contending with it constantly in my own life.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Sometimes it’s external forces that promote self-doubt, like rejections. It doesn’t take many to make you start feeling like you don’t have what it takes, you’ll never make it as an author. But consider the rejections of these authors:
Louis L’Amour had 200 rejections before Bantam Books took a chance on him. Dick Wimmer’s Irish Wine received 162 rejections. The best-selling Chicken Soup For the Soul, by Jack Canfield & Mark Victor Hansen was rejected 144 times. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace, by Robert Pirsig, received 121 rejections.
Murphy, by Samuel Beckett, was rejected 40 times. Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind received 38 rejections. James Patterson received 31 rejections for The Thomas Berryman Number. Carrie, by Stephen King, was rejected 30 times. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
But notice they persisted, and did not let self-doubt keep them from getting published.
Sylvia Plath was right when she said: The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt. So how do we overcome this? First, take comfort in knowing that you’re not alone and that most other writers feel this way too. But the self-doubt isn’t going to magically go away, so feel it, face it head on, and keep writing anyway.
Use your self-doubt as a challenge to get yourself out of your comfort zone and improve your writing. Focus on your strengths instead of your weaknesses. Look at how far you’ve already come! Celebrate your achievements, no matter how small.
Give yourself permission to write badly. Words can be erased or deleted, but every time you put words on paper, it’s a victory over self-doubt. And if you keep going, you’ll start to improve, even if you begin by writing crap.
Have faith. Believe in yourself. Remind yourself of why you started writing in the first place. There’s going to come a moment where you write something and you just know it’s good writing. You are a writer, and you will keep getting better.
Above all, never compare yourselves to others. Sure their work may be amazing, but thinking that you are inadequate when compared to other authors doesn’t make it true. You have your own story to tell and your own way to tell it. Part of conquering self-doubt is about taking pride in your own work and knowing that you have something unique to offer the world.
Fortunately for me, this is one lesson I learned a long time ago. Everyone has their own voice and to compare myself to another writer is like comparing apples and oranges. I may wish for their kind of success, but I would want it for the kind of writing I do, not for the kind they do.
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it.
—William Goldman
This is how you do it: You sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.
— Neil Gaiman
So kick that self-doubt to the curb, and get writing.
* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *
WORDAGE REPORT
Well, here we are again. Another week filled with good intentions and not much else. The cluster headaches persisted through the first part of the week, and then they vanished as mysteriously as they appeared. Such is the way with cluster headaches.
My focus was on poetry last week. I participated in a reading Thursday night and spent a good portion of the week going through my poems and picking out ones to read. I’ve got a lot of poems. And I didn’t like any of them. It didn’t help that I’d be reading in the company of “real” poets.
Eventually I narrowed it down to a handful, printed them off, weeded out a couple that were better on paper, read them aloud, weeded out a couple more, and ended up with about 20-25 minutes worth of poetry to share. And you know what? I decided I liked these poems just fine.
Surprisingly, so did my audience. :-)
NEW WORDS:
1862+682+290+558=3392
UP – 47 words from last week
Goals For Next Week:
Get some words written besides my blog posts.
EDITING:
0 pages
Oh, yeah. That’s what I should have been doing with my extra time last week, not playing the hidden objects game that I “accidentally” downloaded. Oops! I may have to get tough with myself and delete it again.
But seriously, I really do want to get Elemental Spirit done so I can move on to other things. Maybe this week will be the week. You know, miracles do happen . . .
Goal For Next Week:
Start work on An Elemental Spirit.
MARKETING:
Yeah, nothing new here.
Goal For Next Week:
At the very least, I need to update my book page.
TECH & TRAINING:
Nope, nothing here, either. But thanks to the changes in Netflix I’m going to have learn how to delete the account my daughter was sharing with us and set up one of our own. Does that count?
Goal For Next Week:
Learn to use Dropbox properly so I can backup my files.
POETRY WEDNESDAY:
Once again, my poetry post was done and scheduled early. And further more, I kind of like the poem I came up with too. I thought about including it in my reading, but it reads better on paper than it does out loud, so I didn’t.
But going through all those poems made want to revisit the idea of a poetry book. I mean, what’s the point of all those poems if I don’t do anything with them. The problem is, I just write willy-nilly. Other than the fact 90% are written from forms, there’s not much connecting them. So I’m going to have to think on it some more.
Goal For Next Week:
Find another new poetry form to share.
CRAFTING:
This is getting ridiculous. I went ahead and bought a couple of under-the-bed bins for my unfinished yarn projects, and even went so far as to drag the big bin out of the closet to divide the projects between them. At the same time, I figured I’d go through the bags of unfinished projects the father-in-law had given me – yowsa, what a mess! It was a little sad to see these barely started baby sweaters, with no pattern to be able to finish them. And there were five knitted slippers, each one a different size.
There was also a big tangle of yarn – several different colours. I did untangle this one yarn that was a beautiful shade of turquoise. It took me a couple of hours, but there’s enough of it there that I think I can use it to make a big shawl with a lacy black edging. So, worth the effort.
Then I carted the bins with the unfinished projects upstairs and . . . they wouldn’t fit under the bed! They were just slightly too high. So, I’m going to have to swap them out for the ones I’ve got some summer clothes stored in that I know will fit under the bed. I was just too frustrated to do it at the time.
I had a stitchery group meeting on Tuesday, so I got several more rows done on the afghan. I’m at the halfway point now so the end is in sight.
Goal For Next Week:
Work on the afghan. Finish craft migration.
WHAT I’M READING:
Can you believe it? I did not read any Nora Roberts last week. But I did finish The Hungry Ghosts by Shyam Selvadurai. I can’t say I enjoyed it because enjoy just isn’t the right word. But it was a very poignant book.
Goal For Next Week:
Keep up my good reading habits.
GOAL REVIEW:
I must be doing something right. All the posts were up on time and I didn’t even have to stay up late to write them. Go me!
I might have actually gotten around to writing other things, but I lost half a day to the stitchery meeting, almost a whole day going through the bins and bags of unfinished projects. And I also spent considerable time reading and re-reading poems.
Believe it or not, I’ve been thinking a lot about those exercises Stuart Ross gave us to do during his seminar. I’d really like to give them a try, but I’ll have to find the USB stick with my stories on it first.
Even if I’m not writing anything new, I really could be editing something. Maybe I should start keeping track of what I’m doing during the day and when I realize how much time I’m wasting I’ll stop wasting it and be more productive. Kind of like the way a food diary helps you see how much food you’re eating.
As for marketing . . . that’s never going to be my long suit. I think I’m going to just take that off the table for now until I actually start doing some marketing. Ha! Maybe I can take an on-line class about marketing, and that would also contribute to the tech/learning.
Poetry was the shining star last week, and giving the reading had me re-visiting poems I’d forgotten I’d written. I just wish I’d kept up with keeping them organized. I really should think about an anthology though, maybe one using traditional forms.
Got some work done on the afghan, finally, but I still have a ways to go. And now I’ve got all these other unfinished projects dogging my heels too. LOL And the craft migration is almost finished, but that’ll be a post on the other blog.
I read in little bits and pieces last week. Shyam’s book was not one to rush through, although I did stay up late Friday night reading it. Hopefully I’ll be able to keep up the nice, slow pace with the next book I pick up.
The weather has been a roller-coaster of wind, rain, warmth, snow, ice, and a whole lot of greyness, which is really not conducive to getting anything done.
But while it wasn’t a bad week last week, I’m sure I can do better.
