Keeping up confidence in your own writing

[lanalucy]

I was posting this in a writing comm and thought it made a good topic for here, too, so I snatched it. :D

Pretty sure every writer has experienced insecurity about some part of the writing process, moments where we felt discouraged or frustrated. I've only been writing about three years, and I've had plenty of those periods of What the hell am I

Comments

[kdbleu]

I'm probably the worst person to ask/answer right now, but I just keep writing.

Not knowing I wasn't ready is what made me query before maybe I should have. I don't regret that I started querying in May because it's through that process that I got the feedback that's sent me back to revisions, but I'm not even close to recovering from the crash that happened in August when I went from feeling confident about myself and my writing to complete and utter crap. I have a plan for revisions which I'm working through, which helps, but I sorely lacking in direct support right now, which doesn't. Especially since trying to find a mystery specific group/person has proven fruitless, frustrating and kind of demoralizing. :/

But Tuesday when I was spiralling out, I realized that I wasn't going to quit writing.I have always written, and I don't want to go back to fic (quite frankly I wasn't very good at it) so I have to figure something out, which right now for better or worse is to just keep swimming.

[kdbleu]

Unfortunately as much as I love revising, and as much as I know that I'm not where I was a year ago, having to go back and do what I should have done then makes any other progress feel pretty irrelevant. It's been a year of very personally painful and frustrating learning experiences. I didn't need another one.

[lanalucy]

For me, it's all about breaking it down into its tiniest compartmental parts, then checking them off. If I allow myself - even for an instant - to consider the ENORMITY of what needs to be done, I lose hope. So I focus on small, measurable tasks.

This is an excellent strategy. I do get bogged down sometimes when I think about how much work is ahead of me to fix something or to finish a story.

Cannibalize it for parts.

lol I love the gif. It's so apropos!

I acknowledge that what I feel is "perfect" at this moment in time is going to make me cringe in a year, so there's no reason to bemoan it. Letting go allows me to start something new. And that's s where I learn the most about improvement.Letting go to start something new, and learning more about improvement. Yes. Both those things. New, good stuff can't make it into our lives if we're still holding on to the old, icky stuff, or the old good stuff for that matter. Great philosophy. And I learn about myself through my writing, not just how to improve, and writing has been a really

[lanalucy]

Sometimes I am a buddha. Sometimes you are, too. We are all buddha. :D

OM.

[lanalucy]

Those periods of depression are horrible. I hate it when it gets bad and I can't seem to dig my way out of it.

[ecstaticdance]

AMAZING advice above. Seriously. These ladies are smart.

For me, I feel like the secret recipe is a lot of self-forgivness and patience, tied up with a bow of supreme stubbornness.

My life and my temperament sometimes mean that I don't actually manage to open my manuscript for weeks on end. I've been working on my novel - the first one - for about 5 years now. I'm tired. I want to be done already. But I'm nearly through rewriting the whole damn thing, and it's so much stronger than it was even a year ago. I've been making notes about plot holes I've found while going through the revising stage, I've saved all the parts that didn't belong in this first book, I'm wrapping up the story that drove this whole things out of my brain so that the next book can be its own piece of the story instead of being bogged down with extraneous details that don't really belong anymore. I'll need to go back and fill in those gaps I found, but otherwise... I guess the key is remembering that I *am* actually making progress, even if it seems glacial at

[lanalucy]

We do have smart ladies!

Supreme Stubbornness. Yes. There should be a way to manipulate that gene to make it stronger. :D

Taking your time would be more frustrating, I think, but it sounds like it'll be all the stronger for the delay. Maybe the second book will flow more quickly.