Writing Advice: Confidence
Jakebe asks a very common writing question: “How do you fight through the time when you're hating everything you write and think that maybe you're not cut out for this game at all?”
As we are halfway through NaNoWriMo, this is a very pertinent question for a lot of people right now. You may have your 25,000 words down and yet feel like you aren’t doing well at all because the words just don’t seem good enough.
So for the NaNo people at this specific moment, I’ll remind you that this month is about getting the words down. It’s about building habits and confidence in your ability to commit words to virtual paper. At the end of the month when your words are all saved, that’s the time to go back and look at them.
Stepping back from the particular November 15th answer, there are some things to unpack here. The first is that if you’re starting out, your writing is going to fall short of your expectations, and the only way to improve that is with experience. Ira Glass talks about “the gap,” the point in any creative person’s life when they have learned enough to appreciate the best exemplars of their craft and also enough to realize how far they have to go to match them. And, he says, the only solution is to do the work. Push through, and realize that nearly everyone else in your field has been at this exact same point.
Even as you do that volume of work, you’ll still encounter moments like this. Alan Dean Foster, author of well over a hundred novels, said on a panel that almost every author he knows reaches a point in the middle of every novel they write where they hate it and they think it’s boring and who will ever want to read this. I can confirm that this happens to me, every single time.
So you’re not alone. That’s the first thing. Nearly everyone has these same feelings, and yet many of us go on to write books, and not just that, but write books that people like.
Here’s the other thing: you are a biased judge of your own writing. Most beginning writers I know either think their writing is much better than it is, or much worse than it is (the first case is not what we’re talking about here, but if you want to read more about that you can go look up Dunning-Kruger effect). You are the only person who knows the beautiful idea that seized you and impelled you to write a story, and you are therefore the only person who can see the inevitable gaps between what you wanted to tell people and the imperfect words you managed to drop onto a page. When you are in the weeds, especially of a novel, it can be hard to keep the larger story in your head while narrowing your focus enough to write a scene, and it is easy and common to feel that one or the other of those is being short-changed as you work.
The answer to this, at least for me, is experience. When I’m doubting the soggy middle of a novel, I can look back and say, “I’ve felt this way before and I fixed it and the book turned out just fine,” and that’s usually enough to pacify my annoying internal editor. On your way to gaining experience, you can substitute the judgment of trusted writing friends who will tell you that it isn’t all that bad and that you are over-weighting the flaws in it. The act of writing is solitary, but I (and many people I know) rely on friends and colleagues to help get through the tougher parts of it, and this self-doubt is one of those times. Give your story to friends and tell them frankly what your worries are: the characters feel inconsistent, the plot doesn’t make sense, my dialogue sounds artificial. Your friends, if they are good writing friends, will tell you honestly not that your writing is bad, but what steps you need to take to make it better.
That’s the last thing: even if all your worst fears about your writing are true, even if all those flaws are real, recognizing them means you’re capable of fixing them. You might need help, you definitely need to do the work, as Ira Glass says, but you are capable. Writing friends and writing advice books can help set you on the right path, but the way you’ll become a better writer is to make these mistakes so you recognize them in the future and learn to either correct them as you write or to fix them in your edit phase.
It might feel fraudulent to have that confidence early in your career when you don’t think you’ve earned it. All that means is it’s time to go earn it. Keep going.