Show Me On the Doll Where You're Afraid You'll Never Be Good Enough: Dealing with Insecurity (Patreon)

Show Me On the Doll Where You’re Afraid You’ll Never Be Good Enough

Greetings, Citizens of the Laboratory. Autumn is upon us, which means cloudy days, hot fruit pies, apple cider, crisp leaves, and pumpkin-spiced awareness of our own mortality. It’s an early one here in Maine; the first cold snap snapped before the tomatoes finished ripening. I fear it will be a particularly gnarly winter. We’ve had a mild run of it for two years now—New England doesn’t like us to forget who’s boss. (Spoiler: it’s snow.)

I’ve just returned from a convention in Poland, which featured a full schedule of cherry liqueur, tales of exploded dragons, enchanted suitcases, goose soup, and much panel discussion the inherent worth and/or unworth of even bothering to attempt “ambitious” books in this day and age. I was directly asked by an audience member: why write something like Radiance or Palimpsest? Why not just sell out? Since, after all, it’s just so terribly easy to just toss off a successful epic fantasy featuring nothing more innovative than father’s elves, dwarves, and men harassing wenches at a tavern, sit back, and call it a commercially successful day. 

Well, fuck me. 

I mean, that’s not an awkward question to ask a hardworking wench who’s just doing their damn best to pour the ale around here, right? Why not just give the whole thing up and work an office job with actual benefits and a regular schedule while I’m at it? It got to me, I’ll be honest. I am not above being gotten to by this kind of thing. I suppose I thought that after Fairyland, people would stop asking me why I write the books I write the way I write them. That the value of what I make would have proven itself sufficiently to avoid this question I’ve been asked for thirteen years, that coalesces into a slightly different form depending on what particular book we’re discussing. Why did you write The Orphan’s Tales with all those little nested stories, didn’t you think people would get confused? Why did you write Palimpsest with all that weird sex, didn’t you think people would be put off? Why did you write all that Russian stuff, didn’t you think Americans wouldn’t get it? Why did you write Radiance with that structure, didn’t you think it was uncommercial? Why did you write Fairyland with all those fancy words, didn’t you think kids would hate it? 

In essence: why bother?

And you know, it’s exhausting. There are pat, rehearsed answers to all those questions, ones that I fling out on panels and during interviews with a smile and a self-deprecating laugh, as though I just thought of them on the spot. Answers that sound wry, world-wise, equal parts amused, jaded, earnest, and long-suffering, but never resentful. Never defensive. Never, ever irritated at essentially being asked, over and over, by well-meaning people, for the length of your professional career: ew, god, why be you when you could just as easily be not you, have you ever thought of that? 

And having to reply with a smile. That I wrote the book I wanted to write. That you might as well write what you love, because you can’t know what will be a hit. That neither Game of Thrones nor Neuromancer nor Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell nor Discworld nor most other bestsellers you care to name were obvious hits when they were first written and sold. That Fairyland was no one’s idea of a sure-fire win. That when I die, I would rather leave behind books that were personal and dear to me and spoke to something deeper than an elf, a dwarf, and a man walk into a bar. 

And all those answers are true! They aren’t the whole truth, but they’re true enough for prime time.

I don’t bring all this up in order to reserve a special little whinge party full of pity-pinatas in the Fiesta Room of the soul. I bring it up because it’s very easy to see “established” writers as people who have broken free of all the insecurity and fear and crippling self-doubt that plague the writer who is just starting out in this mirrored funhouse of a career. After all, we encourage that image. We don’t talk about our failures in public, or beat our breasts on social media about how we’re worthless hacks who’ll never ever be any good. We don’t wear our imposter syndrome on our sleeves. It’s not good for sales. It’s not good for friendships. A certain level of bombast is expected and desired in a writer, if not actor or musician level, and we try to live up to it. 

But here in the Laboratory, we keep honesty piping hot and continuously in motion.

So let’s sterilize a scalpel, open a vein, and talk about insecurity.

Two things happened while I was overseas that stuck in my heart like pushpins. Both came from friends, not fans or audience members or publishers or radio hosts. I’m telling tales out of school a bit, but it’s all to the greater good. The first was that someone whose work I respect said my work was great, but unreadable. Ouch. Right to the gut. Another shot, please, barkeep. 

The second is that a very dear and sweet person who is just starting to try to get published told me how difficult it was for him to believe his work was good and worthy and had a chance out there in the savage wilds of the slush pile, especially when his friends and colleagues include some truly legendary writers, critics, and editors. He told me some childhood stories and god, you know, sometimes I think all writers are secret siblings, this huge chain of us around the world, who had the same set of primal parents, attended the same platonic school, who never got quite enough love or attention or kindness in ways that differ only in the details. It’s a little wound on fire that fuels a need to live in other worlds than this one, a wound that makes readers and writers and performers, all crying out for a share of the love and approval withheld from us as children or teenagers or adults. 

That’s fine, bartender. Just keep ‘em coming.

My friend asked, toward the end of the trip, what I suggested he do about all this insecurity that kept him from finishing and sending out stories. This fear that he wasn’t good enough. And I’ll be completely honest, my first thought was: well, god, dude, I’ll be fucked if I know. My second thought was: hey, one guy called my books are unreadable three days ago and I’ve been chewing on it like a gumball made of rusty staples ever since so I’m probably the wrong person to ask about getting over self-doubt. My third thought was: I don’t know, man, you just gotta choke it down like the rest of us, what am I supposed to say here? But what I said was what you’re supposed to say: just try, go easy on yourself, believe in your ability long enough to hit send on a submission and hope for the best. 

And that’s true! It’s not the whole truth, but it’s true. 

So here’s the whole truth. The truth we do not and cannot say to beginning writers because we don’t want to hurt you, or hinder you, or take your hope away, or sound like a real insincere asshole who is mocking your very real fear from a safe house on a pretty hill. How do you get over the utterly paralyzing terror that nothing you make is really worth anything, that you’re not worth anything, that you and your work and your deep, delicate soul are all rubbish, cliched rubbish at that, unreadable whipped rubbish cream on top of a rubbish pie, that you could howl the most perfect song of aching beauty into the infinite void of the public sphere and not a single person will give one lonely shit about how exquisite the bridge was, let alone remember the chorus in a month? In an hour?

Oh, baby, oh darling, oh bartender, oh friend, oh earnest member of the audience in this great echoing convention space, you don’t.  

Every writer you admire is afraid of the same shit that keeps you up at night. All of them. I promise. Not all the time and not where you can see them, but they do. It does not go away with your first contract. It does not go away with your first good review. It does not go away with your first award. It does not go away with your first bestseller. It does not go away with a TV series or a tenure position or a kid crying because your book saved their life. It is a basilisk that latches onto you when you first decide you might like to be a writer and never leaves, and if you look too long at it, it can turn you to paralyzed, blocked, unworkable stone. It takes many forms to do its work, not the least of which is the fire-breathing evolution of the I’ll Never Write Anything Good Enough Pokemon—I’ll Never Write Anything As Good As That Thing People Liked Before How the Fuck Did I Even Write That One? Which comes with pernicious friends like the That Thing I Wrote That People Liked Wasn’t Really Good It Was Just Successful Because Reasons and Just Because People Liked That One Thing Doesn’t Mean I’m a Real Artist It Just Means I’m the Cultural Equivalent of McDonalds and Just Because I Wrote a Fancy Book of Fanciness That Fancy People Agreed Was Fancy Doesn’t Mean I’ll Be Able to Feed My Family This Month. Do you think George Martin hasn’t finished The Winds of Winter purely because of poor time management skills, or because he doesn’t care? He’s got this basilisk in his guest bedroom, too. The pressure to make something brilliant all over again when the world is breathing down your neck is an ugly, burning thing, and though we might all like to have that problem instead of the ones we do have, try to imagine what would happen to your deep and delicate artistic soul if someone put a typewriter in your lap on international television and told you to get to work and meet your deadlines. 

Welcome to publishing. This is the world you want. It is a good world. It is a world with much beauty and love and wonder. But that stupid chicken-lizard does not go away. It is your child forever. The blank page and the blinking cursor is the great equalizer. It’s there for everyone, from the Rowlings of the world to the nobody-in-particular-just-yets. From the outside, it looks like we always produce the goods in the end. From the inside, we are always terrified this will be the time we don’t. And sometimes, this is the time we don’t. I have a book coming out tomorrow and I am fully convinced no one will care. One look at Goodreads, one glance at an Amazon ranking, one late night watching other writers announce their successes on Twitter, one person a continent away saying my books are unreadable and I collapse into a quivering pile of self-loathing jello. I’m not proud of that, no one is. But it’s natural. We have so little power over what happens to our stories once they leave our computers that we eat ourselves alive comparing and contrasting as though it’s a competition with everyone else who’s ever written anything, that we burn strange incense at stranger shrines, that we smile and smile when a stranger says ew, why did you write it like that instead of yelling because I fucking felt like it, I don’t know, it pays the bills, doesn’t it? You’re here, aren’t you?

SOUNDS FUN, RIGHT? 

So here’s how you live with it, since you can’t get over it. If you were the kind of easy-breezy-beautiful person who could just get over it and sail through life with unlimited free refills of self-confidence you probably wouldn’t be a writer in the first place. It’s the paradox of the author—it takes tremendous arrogance and belief in yourself to produce good work and almost none of us actually have that brew on tap. So you drink from a bottle.

All the advice about rituals and writing spaces and schedules, all the advice that doesn’t deal with the craft of writing but all the stuff around writing, the epigenetics of a book, so to speak, is all attempting to do the same thing: create a bubble where, very temporarily, the basilisk can’t get in and mess with you. You may not be able to put aside the doubt and fear forever, but you can do it for an hour or two every day, if you can get a space that is to your liking enough that you feel at home and comfortable and safe. If you have some little ritual that starts up the bubble and/or ends it, if you can do whatever it takes to let you believe your a motherfucking badass writer-cum-superhero who is about to punch the world in the face with just how awesome you are. Maybe you can only keep that up for a few minutes—use those minutes to write. Try to scrape more of them together. Then more, and more. It’s all any of us ever do. The best of us can keep it up for days at a time. Even a month or two. It’s why I’ve always written fast—I can’t keep that bubble up for any longer than one or two months. I outrace my basilisk. I outrace my conviction that it’s not worth it to bother with my weird books with their weird structures and weird words. And if you’re reading this, you probably like those words. So hear me when I say that everything you feel in your darkest moments, I do, too. So if I can get that bubble up and running, so can you.

You can let the basilisk back in when it’s time to edit or when you’ve already sent the manuscript in. 

Just don’t look at it too long.

And when they ask you, in a few years, why you wrote it that way, maybe you can wink and say what I never have quite the courage to: because it was good. Wasn’t it good?