Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Doubts

There are days when I wonder if I'm wasting my time. I wonder if every word I've strung together stinks worse than old cheese. I wonder if my plot is plausible or not. I wonder if an editor will look at my ramblings and stop reading after the first few lines.

Today is one of those days.

And still, I write. My fingers tap the keys and my brain guides them away from creating words like was, that and could.

Does the plot have an arc? Are my characters likeable? Will anyone care if my heroine wears a gown I've researched or not? Actually, people who read historical fiction can be sticklers on details, so I'm guessing yes... It begs the question - will the book ever be read by anyone other than my faithful Beta reader? I can never thank her enough.,,

Other writers - some of them good writers - go through this. I am not alone. It doesn't help.

I take some comfort in knowing that today's drivel just might be edited into something readable. But that's tomorrow. Today I wonder if I am writing only for myself.

2 comments:

  1. Just keep hammering away, Julie. Rest assured, you aren't alone with the self-doubt.

    Taken from Nathan Bransford's blog a couple of weeks ago:

    Self-doubt feeds the author. Without self-doubt, we don't strive to do our best --- to keep writing despite rejections and humiliations. (See Dean Koontz, for example, who writes: "I have more self-doubt than any writer I’ve ever known. That is one reason I revise every page to the point of absurdity! The positive aspect of self-doubt – if you can channel it into useful activity instead of being paralyzed by it – is that by the time you reach the end of a novel, you know precisely why you made every decision in the narrative, the multiple purposes of every metaphor and image. Having been your own hardest critic you still have dreams but not illusions."). Self-doubt is what propels us to be better, to write better, to fixate on commas and words that most other people ignore.

    Keep your chin up.

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  2. You're right Bryce. Intellectually I know you are. Hard to believe it when I feel like a monkey with a pen could have crafted better sentences.

    Tomorrow is a new day and if history is any guide, I will feel much better.

    Thanks for your kind words.

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