A Catalogue of Doubts, With Love

Doubt.
It seems a very small five letters to describe something so immense.

Creative self-doubt is an almost inevitable, universal phenomenon. No, let me rephrase, self-doubt in general is an almost inevitable, universal phenomenon. It's a plaguing experience that, even when you feel as though you have fumigated it, has a way of loitering about like a hooligan in the back of your mind, filling all the corners you don't frequent often until it sees an opportunity to slink back out and sabotage your objectives one way or another. It would be unfair of me to claim that writers suffer from doubt most piercingly, because I do not think this is true, but the writer's perspective of incapacitating self-doubt is the one I'm most familiar with, so it's the one I've chosen to talk about today.

First of all, a few words of context: doubt is normal. Big producers feel it. Small producers feel it. The ones who "made it" still have it. The ones "haven't" do too. Incredible projects were probably laced with it. Radical projects maybe even started with it. Successful projects were the ones that fought it. Unsuccessful ones might have be that way if they gave in to it. Potential projects never make it off the drawing board because of it. Second and third tries could be the ones that learnt from it.
Everyone...meet doubt. Actually never mind, I imagine at one point in your life up until this moment, you already have. And it sucks.

Everyone's experience of doubt is different. It's an inner enemy, and inner enemies, being the ones that know us best, the inside jobs, always personalise their plan of attack. There's no one-size-fits-all, no ultimate game-plan. So the best way for me to approach this subject might just be to talk about my own experience with self-doubt in the creative process so far.

The way I look at it, doubt in a writer arises from inseparability. Writing is a fragment of self, so it stands to reason that the relationship between yourself, and your writing, when it comes to self-doubt, is a reciprocal one. What hurts your writing hurts you, what hurts you colours your writing. In one sense the effect of self-doubt is amplified in writers because of the very nature of their craft; they are exposing themselves, they are multiplying themselves, increasing their own available surface area for assault. Jettisoning other versions of themselves for strangers to literally flick through page by page. They are pluralising their vulnerabilities. Writing is a reduplication of personal risk. And, I think, more or less every writer feels it. So if this is you, for whatever comfort it offers, know that it's not only you.

For me, the doubt demon keeps it cutting. "This story, is boring." The most basic of criticisms can bite the worst. "Your world-building is flat." "Your characters are cliche." "None of your ideas are original" (ooh, this one really induces a panic). "You will be a subpar, mediocre, pretentious artist whose work never distinguishes itself for anything. Another name in the background fuzz of literature, a waste of words." Sound familiar? If you've heard it, so have I.
But the worst by far comes when doubt departs from singularity, and decides to rope the "other" into it's arsenal. When it becomes a comparative sport, self-doubt takes on crippling proportions. "Their plotting is so much more intricate than yours" inflicts more trauma than just a simple "hey, you stink at plots". "They're cleverer", "They're so much more eloquent" "Their book is so complex, the details are so well researched, it's so expansive. The detail is breathtaking." introduces jealousy, an incredibly powerful device. Jealousy has the effect of ballooning distance between yourself and your aspirations, it utterly deflates us. We can never be them, because they already "are". When it becomes a case of keeping up with a rival, writing seems insurmountable. Through the biopic of your own mind, your own efforts will always be judged unfavourably against theirs. It introduces a physical barrier, an actual, completed work; a covered, published book you can hold in your hand, beside which your work-in-progress, intangible ambitions become secure as smoke. For me, this was undoubtedly the killing blow. If I could handle the self-flagellation of my own misgivings, I stood no chance against another, solid, tangible, flesh-and-blood human being with a score of their own material achievements to wield.
 
The visible manifestation of this, for my part, was hermetism. I began to read only books that I did not consider to be in direct competition with my own. Ones that addressed a different age group, a different genre, or even a slightly oblique subgenre. Best sellers, books with rave reviews and leaders in the field were all off the table. Awards may well have been wards as far as I was concerned. I could not bring myself to witness the mastery that made these books as admired as they were, and to then draw (as I knew I would) the directly causal conclusion that obviously, this was a demonstration of my own amateurism. As if the two were mutually exclusive. In order to avoid seeing why a book was popular, I avoided popular books.
You may already see the problem here. Arguably, if this had been the response on its own, I would have also, but somehow in retrospect, for want of a better word, I doubt it. Like so many of the troubles our minds fashion for us, it was not on its own, only this time, perhaps that worked to my advantage. As a tactic, running was easy, hiding took no effort at all, these were passive, non-manoeuvres that I could or may have indefinitely maintained. No, the share of the self-doubt snarl that was the most hollowing, exhausting and disabling was the part where I was actively chasing.
What do I mean by that, I hear you ask? Well, in practice, it’s not as mysterious as my metaphorical description suggests. In fact, I flatter myself that as a writer, you may even have given in to it’s temptation already. When I say chasing, I mean my rigorous campaign to smoke out the height-marked threshold of accomplishment. I hunted book recommendations. If a person was unfortunate enough to offhandedly mention their enjoyment of a piece of storytelling, be it written or otherwise, within a certain radius of myself, they invited my interrogation willingly. I was not so interested in what they had to criticise, but I had to know what it was that they loved. What was exciting, what was thrilling, what was clever, what took them by surprise, what was “cool”? I saw a work receiving approval, praise and acclaim and I treated that applause as something with a replicable source to be dug up like preserved ruins in the sand.
In essence, I was chasing definitions. Not what did you find thrilling, exciting, and genius, what you see as cool in XYZ; but what is thrilling, what is exciting, what is genius. What. Is. Cool? Objective, unequivocal answers to concepts that flouted precision. A yes or no. A two plus two. In other words, easy ways out. I wanted to find it, this “perfect book”, drawn from the very best commonalities of literature, and conquer it.
Every book read was an execution of research, and every paragraph was fair game. A semi-frenetic, self-mollifying attempt to deconstruct a piece of work, often riddled with synopses short-cuts, but ultimately driven by the desire to know a story, to encapsulate it in its entirety. To take its pieces apart and see through them thoroughly. A method of mental imbibement with the view that every praiseworthy book must be bled dry for riches. Narratives ran with a continual background hum, like a ventilator fan: “How’s their pacing?” “What’s their format?” “How smart is the dialogue?”. “What method do they use for the art of the reveal?”. Where, basically, do I stand? Dependably, I was either disappointed, with the inevitable disillusionment of high expectations, or dissatisfied.
But writers enjoy reading. In reality, the fact is that they must, enjoy reading. It’s an admission that I once, many years ago, made a feeble attempt to deny, but let’s face it even I have given in. I, enjoy, reading. Yet when reading is coerced into an act of continual vigilance; of absorbing every word, technique and turn of phrase; of memorising character development and conversation; when it blatantly defies the fundamental principle of any book: to give the author control; then it is undeniably a chore. And chores are remarkably poor teachers.
 
I am aware that I have not offered you a very encouraging monologue so far. My apologies, the turn-around is on its way. I promise you I did not write this as an endless, meaningless catalogue of common doubts so that we could all sit and be depressed together. In the title I promised you doubt, but I also promised you love. Which is why I’ll tell you that it is a (fortunate) truth, maybe or maybe not universally acknowledged, that the human condition cannot sustain itself on melancholy and self-denigration. Either we go numb, or we rebel.
I am not writing this today to tell you “my story”, and I writing this to tell you my mistakes. In the hope that by my coming to certain realisations gradually, I will spare you need to repeat the experience by sharing it with you now: Do Your Thing. There is no, one, good. If the only way for me admit it was the impossible task of trying to understand the very basis of personal opinion, a force that ensures we very rarely receive the same account of the same thing, then so be it. When we read to enjoy, we do enjoy. A high-stakes thriller, a confounding mystery, an epic fantasy, a mind-boggling sci-fi, a slow and heartwarming slice-of-life, an atmospheric historical piece, comedy, tragedy, romance. You’ve enjoyed them all, right? Not because they attempted to excel everywhere, but because they picked their battles, chose their objectives, and then they achieved them. I ran myself ragged on a course with no finish line, playing on a field that was not level, never would be. We are incomparable. To designate a “graduation” point after which a book can be called qualified for accomplishment, I turned into a benchmark everything that it was even vaguely conceivable to standardise. Now I’m not trying to tell you to stay in your lane here, and I’m not saying cross-pollination between genres is inadvisable (that could be your thing), but what I want you to know is that when you make up your mind, narrow your cross-hair, and follow through on those targets, that, is good.
As a writer, popularity is the honey trap. Praise is never gospel truth. Reviews are a sinking ship on which to invest yourself. As contentious as this last one is, it’s also among the stealthiest. Quite simply, it is easy to describe something unattainably. A review actually makes such a task, wittingly or not, it’s chief concern. They are in the business of elaborating. I’ve done it, I know. Context is, will always be required. When you sit to read a review, do so with the right glasses on. So, the message we are left with is an ironic one: self-doubt’s methods are the pivot of its own destruction. Its purpose is to convince us of a reality, and in doing so it awakens us to the idea that reality is something we can be convinced of in the first place. By getting to work, it cannot help but subtly offer us the Achilles heel on which it unravels: subjectivity. The world of our perception is an arrangement, a bouquet, that we present to ourselves based on how we choose to interpret facts, and by fact here I mean actions, and events. But if it’s a matter of belief, implicit is disbelief. When we choose what to believe, we are also choosing what to not, it’s a double act, and both should be just as accessible. The line between delusion and conviction can be necessarily thin, and sometimes it’s no more complicated that writing our own internal discourse. Tell yourself. Remind yourself that you are capable, learning, imperfect. Remind yourself of what you want.
We suffer an observer syndrome; browsing the bookshelf, scrolling the feed; every brilliant, vibrant intriguing, innovative hilarious bit of work that hundreds of people may already have done is performed to us all at once. We see all, as all. Achievement is suddenly the sum of a million parts, not just made of a million parts. Our challenge, is to be critical enough. Critical enough to know when we are seeing something that requires more criticism. To know when to doubt our doubt.
By circumventing high-ranked books, I was depriving myself of the opportunity to expand; by analytically dissecting, I was depriving myself of the opportunity to expand organically. The optimum lies somewhere between. My advice to you, I think, is that experience need not always be so imposed, but something is wrong the moment you find yourself fleeing. Never take another’s word for it, at least not seriously. To a writer, no review is a solid substructure to your own rational judgement. Face up, show up, investigate for yourself: read amazing books. Write amazing books. And make them amazing because you wrote them. There are never enough amazing books. And the last person who wrote an amazing book can’t write one like you will. Face your “competitors” as compeers, let their brilliance hit you head on, roll to it, experience deeply, and then get over them. So that you can polish your own to brilliance in turn, to hit hard and be gotten over just the same. Respectfully, mutually, you are sounding bords both as vivid as each other. And so we all progress. We come out the other side feeling the return to our own style comfortingly jarringly in reassurance that that is what we have got: style. It might change, you might experiment, but it must be yours.
“Gotten over” is charged phrase maybe, but a necessary one, because here it just means keep moving, even if that’s a clean break. Not a clean break from appreciating their talent, a clean break from letting that persuade you yours is null. There is no relation. Julia Cameron says it well, when she calls him Nigel, her inner critic, a pesky, fussy little man who never leaves, and with whom, frankly, “there is no winning”[1]. You can’t eradicate them, only shrink them, but maybe that is enough. He or she will revel in the opportunity to fabricate associations between others’ ability and your own. But I’m afraid it’s up to you, as Julia informs us, to be strong enough to reply. And say “Thank you for sharing, but I think I’ll just keep writing.”[2]
Because yes, you should.
 

 Thank you for reading and, as always, stay curious.


References:
[1], [2]- Cameron, J. Write for Life, (London: Souvenir Press, 2023), pg.49