Every time I teach a workshop, I become afflicted by this weird sense that what people REALLY want me to do is give them the magical key, and that I’m failing them in some obscure way.
Objectively, I know that isn’t true. At least not in the annual workshop I teach at Bedford Library, in TX, where many of the regulars are either returned customers or my fledgelings, anyway, and so know that I have no magical key. If I did, I’d be J. K. Rowling and I’d hire people to do the cat boxes instead of spending all day yesterday trying to find the pee spots and clean them, because the guys didn’t do the litter boxes while I was gone.
But I was once myself a newbie, and looking for the magical key. You know the one. You get it, and then you’re a writer, a real writer, one of those people you admired madly when you were a kid. You know, I can’t imagine Heinlein turning out a novel I wouldn’t want to read. Even the late, confused ones, were “good” compared to everything else I could have read. And of course, I would buy them. Same for Diana Wynne Jones, in that last novel that fails to close: it’s still a good ride while it lasts.
Which brings us to – that’s where I want to be, where people know they’ll like what I write.
Will I ever be there? And will I know if I am?
Prognosis guarded on the first, and definitely negative on the second.
My younger son upbraided me the other day for being a veteran writer who behaves “apprehensive and diffident” like a “just broke in” writer.
But I feel apprehensive and diffident. Every new book I start, I feel like I’m going to crash on my face. Yes, I know a lot more about writing than I did when I’d just broken in, but then I also know more ways to crash land and can see the pitfalls on every side.
Part of this is personality, of course. Without my husband behind me every step of the way, I’d never even have mustered the confidence to send the FIRST short story out to editors.
And part of it is… this weird avocation – no, this weird affliction of ours.
There is no right way to be a writer. I can teach you craft – that is, teach you techniques that have worked for those who’ve come before you. If you need to know how to unobtrusively drop information in, if you want to know how to tag dialogue, or how to use description to advance plot, sure I can help you with that.
But will these techniques work for you? Some of them sure. But all of them? Not unless you’re a sort of archetypal writer, existing in archetype land. Most writers, in the end, must find out which “rules” to break and how to find their own voice, their own genre, their own style, their own path.
Each of us is a lone traveler, forging the road as we walk it. Those who’ve traveled similar roads before can give us advice – don’t stop. To stop is to die – and warnings – don’t go too far off the path, there are no readers there – but in the end, our path is different than theirs and might take interesting detours they would say are “just wrong.”
The problem with that sort of path is that humans are social animals. We all want to know we’re doing it “right” and following the “right” path to success. And that doesn’t exist in writing.
Which is why so many of today’s scams prey on giving writers the “status” of published. They will publish you. You won’t see a dime, but they will publish you, and you’ll know someone else thinks you’re a writer.
I’m here to tell you that if that works for you, you’re very odd. It might calm the horrors for a while, but every traditionally published writer I know, no matter the level of success, wakes up in the night thinking “What if I’m doing it all wrong? What if I’m not a real writer at all?”
This is why the traditionally published writers bash all the indies. They’re not sure of their status, and they want to reassure themselves that they’re “real.”
But that too is a pitfall. The fact that you’re not sure, the fact you keep striving and learning, is what creates your own road.
If I gave you the magical key today, that road would be over, and you’d stagnate. You might find like some mega successes that you only had one “good” series or even character in you. You might slowly fade away into “has been” and “satisfied.”
And though that seems sometimes desirable, it’s also dying a little for a writer. Because writers write, and good writers keep improving.
Cherish your self-doubts, and pet them, and call the George. They are your best chance at attaining greatness.
Mad Genius Club 
32 responses to “A Self-Doubt Called George”
[…] UPDATE: a different post is up at Mad Genius Club: A Self-Doubt Called George. […]
Well…that’ll take a little work. Cherishing the self-doubts? I’m still working on seeing past them and deciding whether or not to proceed.
Look at it like fear. Fear helps you stay alive, no matter how unpleasant it is, unless you let it rule you.
The trick with public performance is to perceive a rush of nervous adrenaline as pleasurable and not scary, because the initial physical symptoms of walking out on a stage (and getting stared at) are exactly the same either way.
The other trick is to keep going. No matter what happens, keep going and pretend you meant to do that, because nobody else will notice and hate your mistakes as much as you do.
Of course, you can’t revise singing or acting; you just have to do it better next time. But writers are always doing something different next time. Still, they get to revise instead of just fixing it and practicing it a different way….
“that’s where I want to be, where people know they’ll like what I write”
Congratulations. You’re there. Or, at least, you’re as close to there as you can get without doing what Heinlein did and writing in only one genre. (As long as Amazon refrains from virtu-shelving your non-SF along with your SF, you’re already closer to that point for me than Heinlein was. Of the work of yours that I’ve read already, the story I liked _least_, I still prefer to “Stranger in a Strange Land”. And I’ve bought everything that’s available for purchase in electronic form under your name, whether at Amazon or baenebooks.)
I would dispute the notion that self-doubt is necessary or helpful, though. Do not cherish your self-doubts. Cherish, rather, the certain knowledge that your fans can figure out where you live, and if you ever stop writing, some coalition of them is likely to descend upon your house and…”persuade” you to resume. 😉
LOL — I have for years had people emailing me and threatening to hold my cats hostage, if I don’t write the next of whatever.
And thank you.
I wouldn’t threaten to hold your cats hostage. Miranda and Kili would square off, and the boys would end up pissing everything in terror. Or worse, they’d team up. I’m not sure which is more frightening. I’d never sleep soundly again.
No, I’d threaten to mail stinky little catnip-filled fishies to your house. On a subscription plan. Muahahaha!
You are a terrifying woman! 😛
I have a lot more self-doubt about my non-fiction than my fiction. I get judged more on the non-fiction, and a goodly proportion of my public career hangs on what *ahem* “serious professionals” think about my history stuff. Fiction readers seem to be a tad more forgiving.
That typed, I still got the willies last week when I read through the manuscript for the “last chance to spot the errors and make changes before it gets formatted” review. I need to change this! That sentence is clunky! Is that a plot hole or just a shadow? Will people like this? It’s so much darker than the last two! Arrrgh! *pant, pant, pant*
Perfectly normal and don’t you DARE do style changes on page proof. Because by then you’re sick of the story and you’ve lost the storytelling voice. Pay attention to Dean on that!
I only did one style edit – “toward” got used three times in two almost consecutive sentences and Ye Editor and I had both missed it on the first run. Otherwise it was all wandering punctuation (how did that apostrophe get over there?) Five changes in 92K words, and no, I didn’t go with any of the other style changes my writer brain was screaming for. Mostly because I was tired, not out of any wisdom on my part. 🙂
When I re-read DST before I wrote DSR and AFGM it read “choppy” — thank heavens I couldn’t rewrite.
Ah, hah! I spy a rule. (I can glean a rule anywhere). The prescriptive rule is “don’t do style changes on page proof.” The more general performance-based rule is “no more style changes once your sick of it.” Have I got that right?
For most people, yes.
Except maybe one would fix “your” to say “you’re” if one committed a type.
🙂
typo. 😛
You know, this is a law of nature, if you write to correct a typo… 😉
Sigh. I just give up.
Dean once linked to the blog of an editor who inherited the job of editing a Western author. I didn’t recognize the name, since Western isn’t my genre, but it was pretty much the biggest name in the field at the time. And the editor said that author would call at the midpoint of every single book, and mourn that he was a fraud and the book was trash. At WorldCon, I caught a panel where Sheila and Gardner and others spoke of epic calls from authors on the verge of a breakdown.
I take comfort in these stories. They tell me that doubts are normal, expected, and not a reason to quit.
In fact, some days my biggest doubt is that I don’t seem to have enough doubts. My ego is large enough to have its own gravitational pull. Maybe a little more doubt would give me some humility and make me a better writer. But no, I just write and move on, doubt free…
When my first story came out (after 12? years of working to be published) my friend Charles called me from the magazine shop downtown to say “Absolute Magnitude is on the stand, and you’re in it.” My response “OMG. What if someone buys it and reads and finds out I’m not very good. BUY EVERY COPY.” Then I realized I couldn’t buy every copy in the country. Took me a week to stop having the horrors and start sending stuff out again.
I don’t really do creative writing, yet, so I don’t have any late of the night anxieties about writing stories, for the most part. (Bunch of ‘that isn’t a story, yet’ and ‘even when that is a story, that stays on my hard drive’, but the latter isn’t a quality issue.)
Everything else, however, I tend to have doubts over. ‘How did I come across in that conversation?’ ‘Am I really qualified for this?’ ‘What if I can’t do it?’ ‘What if the guy I need to work with on this jerks things out from under me?’ ‘What if I’m wrong in my assumptions about me being useful at this?’ ‘Have I screwed things up beyond repair?’
See my advice above. But here’s my other rule about performance.
You have to do your best at the time, accept any praise graciously, and then move on. Picking at your own performance and obsessing over it? Not a good move, doesn’t provide you with good data. Just do the best you can manage every time, and then think about the next thing you have to do.
Re: Jones’ last novel. Is that the stained glass one? Because that was the last one of hers that I’ve found.
No more Chrestomanci. No more Dalemark. Sigh.
Her last one — d*mn it, I’m losing titles. MIGHT have been The House of Many Ways. I have it somewhere on the bookshelf.
I’m not sure which one that was.
It sounds vaguely like the one I remember as second to last, an in the same universe as, but not exactly followup to Howl’s Moving Castle. (Book three or so, Book two maybe being something like Castle in the Sky, or maybe I’m channeling Ghibli there. Book two was more of a follow up, and started off sort of arabian story themed.)
The one I remember as last was not, as far as I could figure, in the universe of any of the others of hers that I’ve read. It had a house with a stained glass window. (There are a couple of her books I know I haven’t read. Couldn’t get into the Tam Lin one, even after growing up a lot, and also had problems with one that had a ghost, unless I’m confusing that with a Helen Cresswell book. My vague memories of it feel like her, but I just couldn’t read it.)
The Ghost one, whose name is also evading me, eventually became one of my favorite ones, as did the one set in a con. I’ll try for the titles again tomorrow. right now I’m a total blank.
Wikipedia has a list of her books by publication date; according to that, House of Many Ways came out in 2008, and Enchanted Glass came out in 2010, making that one her last unless you count posthumously-published works. (In which case it would be either Earwig and the Witch, or the due-out-next-year The Islands of Chaldea, co-written by her sister Ursula.)
Enchanted glass.
I actually love Deep Secret, though it’s a weird book.
Thinking about the doubt thing, our society (and many others, but I’m not a part of them, so) tends to encourage suppressing doubt, or at least the expression of it. We internalize and privatize our doubts and put the brave face outward. There are excellent reasons for this, of course. But what I find more interesting is hearing other people expressing feelings of doubt that feel like they’re all mine. Why are those people talking about my own private hell? Has the NSA tapped my brain?!?
We tend to isolate ourselves with our doubts and there’s a little bit of toxicity in that.
Fledgling thoughts, for your consumption. Feel free to add butter.
Maybe, similar to how courage is not the absence of fear but carrying on in spite of fear, confidence is not the absence of doubt, but carrying on in spite of doubt.
Self doubt can’t be allowed free rein, otherwise we end up not daring to do anything. But we still need that frission of terror to make the ride exciting, and to keep us from going to far the other direction, and, as you say, thinking we know all about writing, and don’t need to learn anything further.
Cherish your self-doubts, and pet them, and call the George.
Sounds like good advice to me. “Ring… ring… Hello, is Kyrie there?”
Being serious for a moment (what? I totally can!), I’m the opposite of what TXRed said at 2:04 PM. I have had plenty of people praise my non-fiction writing style, but I’ve never been satisfied with the fiction I’ve tried to write. (Except for one piece, where the plot was already written for me and I just had to give the main character a voice.) So it’s been a lot harder for me to sit down and write fiction. Non-fiction? Easy. So, of course, I don’t feel that writing non-fiction is any kind of accomplishment, but I really wish I could get those story ideas out of my head and onto
paperscreen.Wait, you don’t have the magical key? Damn. How about a nice direct brain-neural thingy interface instead? There’s plenty of mush to overwrite. I won’t miss it.