self-doubt

Writing Begins With Forgiveness: Why One of the Most Common Pieces of Writing Advice Is Wrong

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This post by Daniel José Older originally appeared on Seven Scribes on 9/9/15.

Writing advice blogs say it. Your favorite writers say it. MFA programs say it.

Write every single day.

It’s one of the most common pieces of writing advice and it’s wildly off base. I get it: The idea is to stay on your grind no matter what, don’t get discouraged, don’t slow down even when the muse isn’t cooperating and non-writing life tugs at your sleeve. In this convoluted, simplified version of the truly complex nature of creativity, missing a day is tantamount to giving up, the gateway drug to joining the masses of non-writing slouches.

Nonsense.

Here’s what stops more people from writing than anything else: shame. That creeping, nagging sense of ‘should be,’ ‘should have been,’ and ‘if only I had…’ Shame lives in the body, it clenches our muscles when we sit at the keyboard, takes up valuable mental space with useless, repetitive conversations. Shame, and the resulting paralysis, are what happen when the whole world drills into you that you should be writing every day and you’re not.

 

Read the full post on Seven Scribes.

 

How to Become the Artist You Were Born to Be

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This essay by Bernard Hiller originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 7/10/15.

By becoming authentic. WHAT’S STOPPING THAT?

Ask yourself, what did you have to do to be loved, as a child? Most kids are not encouraged to believe in their uniqueness. If you had to behave like someone other than yourself, then you stopped being your authentic self. And, what is authenticity? Sharing your passion with others and making your soul visible to the world.

Below is a list of common traits that prevent you from living your life and fulfilling your destiny.

 

1) Being a People Pleaser.
Behaving or doing something you don’t really want to do-in order to make someone else happy. People pleasers neglect their own needs and wants and inevitably become angry and frustrated. You’re hoping the other person will validate you, but you just end up being resentful.

Start loving your Needs and Wants. The better you feel about yourself, the more you are willing to invest in yourself. If you don’t invest in yourself, nobody else will.

 

2) Living in the Past or Future.

 

Read the full essay on The Huffington Post.

 

Stephen King, the Threat That Hangs Over All Writers

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This post by Jessica Aspen originally appeared on her site on 8/21/14.

I’ve started writing ghost stories. Gothic romances of vulnerable heroines, desperate heroes, and scary haunted ghosts. I have an extensive reading background in Gothic romance and I love it, so it’s easy for me to create the spooky house, the dark and stormy night, and the hero who might be a threat.

What isn’t so easy for me was writing the ghost. But luckily I have my own ghost lurking behind me, Stephen King. Not that my little haunted holiday romance is anything like Stephen King’s writing. It’s not. Not at all. Don’t pick it up thinking it is. But more to the point, Stephen King is what scares me.

I’m so terrified of him that I’ve never even read one of his fiction books. Just the idea of reading Cujo or Pet Cemetery makes my palms tingle and my knees weak. I know I won’t sleep. I know I’ll be afraid to even turn off the light.

 

Click here to read the full post on Jessica Aspen’s site.

 

Confessions of a Bad Writer Gone Good

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This post by Julia Scott originally appeared on The Huffington Post on 9/2/14.

There is a certain kind of bad writing that occurs when you are between the ages of 16 and 24 and have an audience of one. ‘Self-indulgent’ doesn’t begin to describe it, and in fact to do so would minimize the intense feeling of urgency of budding writers of a certain age who feel called to bear witness to our years of transition. From falling in love to falling apart, the themes are big and the feelings are bigger. It’s all so overwhelming. The only way to get a grip on the given moment – to slow it down long enough to see it pass — is to write it.

I want to experience LIFE viscerally, but at the same time step back and think about it all.

That’s a line from a journal entry I wrote as a trembling, sensitive 19-year old on the eve of my 20th birthday, rediscovered nearly 15 years later whilst looking through the diary pages of my sad, anxious year abroad in Paris. The ink was green on yellowed stationary, and as I read it, I remembered walking the streets of that indifferent city as a virginal college junior — the dank wetness of winter, the diesel fumes, the existential fear of failure that leveled me for hours on my thin cot in the drafty boarding house I shared with a hundred other women, run by nuns.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Huffington Post.

 

New Non-Scientific Information About Not Good Enough Syndrome

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This post by Andrew E. Kaufman originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/16/14.

I’m reaching a point in my current manuscript where I feel as though I’m starting to get a handle on things.

Well, that’s a relative term.

One never truly has a handle on things when one suffers from what is known as Not Good Enough Syndrome. You may have heard of this affliction. It’s non-specific, widely undocumented, and for the most part, difficult to diagnose.

Symptoms may include:

• Self doubt

• Self-loathing

• Second-guessing everything.

• Not liking anything.

• Lack of inspiration, ideas, or sanity.

• Isolated episodes of global panic (with intermittent aspirations of world-building).

• Private, self-contained tantrums, which can range in severity.

And there are subcategories, and of course, I have a few of those as well. Currently I’m in the throes of, There Aren’t Enough Damned Twists in this Book! (Yes! There is an actual exclamation point at the end! A demarcation of severity!)

 

Click here to read the full post on The Crime Fiction Collective blog.

Start Writing Your Novel Now

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This post by Lovelyn Bettison originally appeared on her blog on 12/6/13.

It’s come to my attention that a lot of people want to write a novel. It seems like most people think they’ve got a book in them, but for some reason they just haven’t gotten around to writing it.

There are a lot of excuses for not sitting down and actually getting to that novel you’ve always dreamed of writing, but this post isn’t about excuses. I don’t want to hear any of those. Many writers have gotten up a few hours earlier than usual to write in the morning before heading out for work. Many have burned the midnight oil after work to write the book they always dreamed of writing.

Walter Mosely wrote his novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, whilst working full time. I heard an interview with Toni Morrison in which she described handwriting The Bluest Eyes on a legal pad with her baby in her arms. If you really want to write a book you will find a way to make it happen. If it is important to you you’ll make time for it.

Here are some tips to get you started.

Make a commitment to write everyday. Writers write. You can’t call yourself a writer if you don’t. Give yourself an allotted amount of time, whatever you feel like you can set aside: an hour, thirty minutes. Whatever you feel like you can do is fine. Sit in front of your computer, with the internet off preferably, and write something. Write anything at first. This is just to get you used to writing.

Even if you only come up with a couple of sentences that’s fine.

 

Click here to read the full post on Lovelyn Bettison’s blog.

 

NaNoWriMo Dialogues: “On Doubt, Talent, Failure, And Quitting “

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This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 11/18/13.

You: I made a terrible error.

Me: You tried to punch that coyote again.

You: No.

Me: You huffed wood varnish and got lost in the mall.

You: No. Well, yes, but that’s not the mistake I’m talking about.

Me: You ate all the bacon again.

You: That’s not a mistake. That’s me fulfilling my manifest destiny.

Me: It’s a mistake because when you eat all the bacon, I turn into Bacon Hulk and I rip your puny form to Kleenex ribbons out of sheer, baconless rage.

You: I see your point. I didn’t eat all the bacon, it’s still downstairs, chillax.

Me: Nobody says “chillax” anymore. The new word is “coolquilize.”

You: JESUS GOD WHATEVER can I tell you my mistake now or what?

Me: Bleah, sure, go for it.

You: I’ve been reading other people’s work as I write.

Me: Reading is fundamental. Writers who don’t read are like screenwriters that don’t watch movies, like architects who don’t strop up sexually against elegant skyscrapers, like professional killers who do not admire the work of other professional killers from the telescoping lens of a distant hijacked drone. Writers have to read. It is an essential spice to this broth we’re brewing. Writers who don’t read are missing their souls.

You: Fine, yes, yeah, I just mean — some people have been posting their NaNoWriMo projects. Like, snippets or whole sections and, hoooo heeee unnnnh — *rocks back and forth while massaging temples* — I have discovered through this that I am not good enough.

Me: Oh, god, more of this again. Okay. Huddle up. Writing a story is in some ways an act of obstacle management and you’ve gotta manage all the obstacles accordingly — jump all the fences, hop all the ditches, elbow all your enemies right in their spongy tracheas. One of the biggest obstacles is self-doubt. Doubt is the vampire you invite into your house. Doubt is bedbugs and hobos — it fucking lingers, man, like the scent of cigarette smoke in your curtains, or the odor of cat piss in your carpets.

You: So, what do I do about doubt? It sounds like a demon. AN ACTUAL DEMON THAT REQUIRES SOME KIND OF EXORCISM IS THERE A BOOK A HOLY BOOK PLEASE HELP.

Me: The book you’re writing is the holy book.

You: Wuzza?

 

Click here to read the rest of the post on terribleminds.