This is me.
Every single time — EVERY TIME — I write something, I feel an overwhelming sense of panic that what I just wrote is crap. I sat on One Minute to a New Midnight for something like eight months before I got up the guts to post it this past…
Looks like it’s time to post this again: Ira Glass on Creativity and the long slog.
“What nobody tells people who are beginners — and I really wish someone had told this to me … is that all of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, and it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not.
But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase. They quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know it’s normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story.
It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Mr. Glass is 200% right, but it goes beyond that. Kryptaria’s no spring chicken when it comes to writing (I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s one of the writers MyLittleCorner stares at and then flips tables over ^_^), and even people like Neil Gaiman have commented on this. Almost all of us get the “OMG IT SUCKS WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE” bug.
There are several forces at work, here.
One is that no matter how long you’ve been writing, you as the writer have an image in your head of the story as it ‘should’ be. @hen everyone else is telling you, “No, but this is great!” and you’re sitting there saying, “But you don’t understand…!” this is what is happening. Only you know what you wanted to do with that story and how close you came to getting there. This can actually hold MORE true the longer you’ve been writing, as you become more familiar with your own abilities and what you believe you had it in yourself to accomplish.
There are two ways to deal with this. You can attempt to keep laboring on that puppy till it DOES match what’s in your head. (This is why it can take me four months to write a 6000 word story.) Sometimes, however, it turns out that it simply never will, and has become a different story in the process of laying it down on the paper. In that case, you must learn when to say “Fuck it,” and release it into the wild, lumps and all. ’Learning,’ unfortunately, more or less means repeatedly pushing that painful zappy button till it just doesn’t hurt as much anymore.
Another issue contributing to the “I suck” phenomenon is our insidious tendency to compare ourselves to other writers. Of course we always pick the best writers, because we have great taste, and but we put no thought into how much longer than us they’ve been writing, or whether their strengths are compatible with ours.
This is why I’m so big on documenting and sharing process. If you feel that you must do this, then try comparing yourself, if you can, with that writer as they were when they had the same amount of experience you do. Try looking, if you can, at all the things they tried to do and failed at. Try finding out about all the stories they never published because they were crap, or left sitting in a WIPs folder unfinished. Remember, when we look at what they’ve published, we see only the victories of those other writers, not their failures.
This is something fandom is particularly beautiful for. We can talk to each other. If you have a fanfic writer you adore, comment and tell them how much you admire them, and how you’d like to write like them, and ASK them, “Can you tell me how many WIPs you’ve left unfinished?” or “How well do YOU feel you accomplished this story?” It won’t offend us! We’re writers, too; we’re standing the exact same place you are, staring up the ladder at somebody (it might even be you!) and wondering wistfully if we’ll ever get there. Plus, we’re not even professional writers. This is fandom. We’re all just delightfully obsessed dorks hurling words onto paper.
Oh, hey, while you’re at it, you can also ask questions like, “You do this thing in your stories so well! How do you do that?” They may say, “I dunno, I just do,” but then again they may be able to tell you exactly how they accomplish it. (Yes, that’s right! Writing includes learnable, transferable techniques!)
So do that, if you feel that itch to compare yourself to other writers. Compare yourself to the full picture, not just the best face of it.
The third issue is that no writer ever has an entirely sound, objective idea of his or her own story. We spend too much time inside it. We know things about it other people don’t know. We stare at the words till everything we write sounds like gibberish and we don’t even really want to do this anymore but the damn story still isn’t finished ARGH. It’s like staring at something in minute detail until it starts growing distorted in your mind’s eye. In fact, that’s exactly what happens. Sometimes I bring in betas just to read something and reassure me that it doesn’t suck as much as my brain is telling me it does.
And of course, issue #4 is those freaking self-esteem problem. They’re endemic, man, they get into everything. You know what, though, fuck them. If you’ve written something and you’ve had 20 kudos and 5 comments from people telling you that they loved it, then that’s at least 20 to 1 (the 1 being you) that your “This sucks” voice is wrong. And if it’s 20 kudos, 5 positive comments, and 1 negative comment, then that’s still 20 to 2. The math don’t lie, baby. Your brain does. Don’t trust your brain.