Self-doubt, Part 1

Have you ever met a writer (usually a very young one) who tells you, “I love to write! I can’t wait to sit down each morning. I love everything about it!”

My first thought: “Either this guy is crazy … or he’s living in a dimension with which I am not familiar.”

Likewise, I’ve encountered writers who will tell you of their work-in-progress, “It’s dynamite! Readers are gonna love it!”

Again I think, “What planet does this dude inhabit? Because it sure ain’t the one I live on.”

“Wait till you see what I’m doing with Twitter. It’s gonna be FAN-tastic!”

Here’s my mantra re self-doubt:

If I’m not crippled with self-doubt for at least the first nine months of a project (and sometimes a lot longer), something is wrong.

You and I should be feeling self-doubt.

We should be terrified.

1. Because self-doubt comes (often) from trying to second-guess readers’ response to what we’re writing.

We can’t do that. Nobody can. William Goldman was 100% right when he said, “Nobody knows anything.”

2. But the main freight of self-doubt is simply Resistance, i.e. our own self-sabotage. And the First Law of Resistance is:

The more important a project is to the evolution of our soul, the more Resistance we will feel to it.

In other words, self-doubt is good. Massive self-doubt tells us that our Resistance, sensing the positive power of the book/screenplay/painting/dance/symphony we are working on, has pulled out all the stops, trying to undermine us and make us give up.

When I ask a writer of her current project, “How’s it going?”, the answer I want to hear is, “I hate it … I’m so confused … I have no idea what I’m doing … this is going to be a disaster!”

If you and I ain’t feeling self-doubt, we ain’t working.

The post Self-doubt, Part 1 first appeared on Steven Pressfield.