Insecurities & Perfectionism #AuthorProblems
The other day I posted about the pleasure I get at the tactile act of handwriting pages of my novel, it’s an enjoyable experience and one that I haven’t done in a while, and lately I’m starting to remember why.
In the early morning hours of my first work break, having written maybe a few pages or even a few paragraphs everything feels shiny and interesting. By lunch time maybe a few more pages can be written, and even then it still feels like the story is going good. You’re getting writing done and it’s all going to be worth it. And then… you get home. You’ve had time to settle, and as you sit typing up the pages you wrote from the morning you start to realize… what the hell is this? This isn’t what I wrote. This is dreck, and half of it isn’t even words. What the hell happened to my shiny interesting pages? Maybe it isn’t as dramatic as they aren’t really words, it’s just they’re not the words you thought they were. They aren’t as exciting and interesting as they seemed several hours before and you start to second guess yourself. You begin to wonder (as so many authors do) if you still have it, or perhaps even if you ever had it to begin with? Am I crazy to think I could ever hope to be a writer? Sure I’m writing, there are words on the page, but they’re not the words I thought they would be, there not what they were supposed to be. Suddenly you’re drowning in a sea of self doubt and there is no life preserver, because no matter how many nice things people say to you, no matter how many compliments you get, or no matter how much someone may try to drag you out of it, it’s all in your mind, and there is no escaping that until you’re ready. It’s a dark and terrifying place to be, made worse by this constant perfectionist tendency. No matter how many times we tell ourselves that perfection is an illusion, that there is no such thing as perfect, it doesn’t change how we feel. It doesn’t change how I feel. It doesn’t end the self doubt, it just frustrates me more.
So where do we go from here? Where do you go when giving up is not an option but all you want to do is scrap everything you’ve ever written and start over? How do you power through the dark times of self doubt and an obsession with perfectionism?
I’m genuinely asking, because I just don’t know where to go from here. Do I push through it, can I push through it, or should I maybe give the story a rest? Work on something else for a while. Where do you go when it feels like everything you’ve worked towards is just falling apart midway through? I don’t want to give up on this story, even if it would probably be better for me if I did. So I’m asking… how do you get through the dark times of self doubt? How do you push forward when all you want to do is crawl up in a ball under the covers and sleep?
