The Self-sabotaging Writer’s Blues

A tragic-comic list has been doing the rounds recently on Twitter. Entitled ‘The Creative Process’, the list is a seven-stage description of how writers often feel when they embark upon a new project: ‘1. This is awesome 2. This is tricky 3. This is s**t 4. I am s**t 5. Everything I do is s**t 6. AARRGGHH 7. Booze.’

Behind this humorous tweet lies an all-too-familiar state of mind that I usually describe to my writing students as ‘The Self-Sabotaging Writer’s Blues’. For the lucky ones it is a temporary crisis of confidence that is quickly overcome. For others, it can lead to the complete abandonment of a writing project. So how do writers find their way through a thicket of paralysing anxieties?

The first thing to acknowledge is that these fears can be useful. Writing is tricky. Not everything you put in a first draft is going to be worth salvaging in the second draft. Sometimes what we write really is ‘s**t’. Our critical faculties are invaluable in helping us to refine our writing until it is of a publishable standard. And there is always consolation in remembering the famous Thomas Mann quote: ‘A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.’          

There is also consolation in knowing that even the most successful authors are often still struggling with this stuff in the midst of their brilliant careers. At the State Library of Victoria last year award-winning writer Christos Tsiolkas described the inner critic who sometimes gets in the way of his writing: ‘There’s this voice on my shoulder that says, “Are you good enough? Are you a fraud? Are you deserving to be… a writer?” (But as well as) that voice that says, “you’re no damn good”, there’s the other one that goes, “you’re a bloody genius.” Equally wrong. I think.’ Tsiolkas has mined his own creative anxiety in writing Barracuda, a novel that he describes as ‘dealing with the question of success and failure’.

For some writers the self-sabotaging blues can get in the way of completing a project. For others they can prevent us from even coming up with a project in the first place. In an essay for The Millions online magazine, novelist Toni Jordan (Addition, The Fall Girl) described the paralysis that overtook her after she finished her second novel: ‘I wrote nothing for more than a year. Nada. Zilch. This was the bleakest stretch I could remember… I called my long-time publisher (and said) ‘my career is over… I’ll never get another idea… I am doomed.’ Fortunately her publisher didn’t take her seriously (‘that’s what you said after your first book’) and Toni Jordan’s third novel, Nine Days, was published in 2012. 

Deborah Robertson, author of the critically-acclaimed novels Careless and Sweet Old World, says she thinks it’s important to ‘learn to tell the difference between genuine self-criticism and the demands of the ego. At an important level being overly concerned with yourself (rather than the work in front of you) is a failure to take the work of writing seriously. Writing demands a certain moral toughness and stamina and it helps to be very clear with yourself about your reasons for writing.’

So what exactly are these paralyzing thoughts produced by our inner critic, and how can they be combatted? When prompted, my writing students can easily fill a whiteboard with these nasty little saboteurs, but the three most common seem to be:

-       I have nothing original to say with my writing

-       I’m too old to be a successful writer (or too young)

-       No one will want to read or publish this stuff because it’s no good

Writer and academic Professor Ross Gibson addressed the hoary old question of originality in a keynote speech for the recent Creative Manouevres conference in Canberra. ‘How do you stop yourself being oppressed by everything that has gone before?’ he asked his audience of writers.  ‘How do you trick yourself into writing?’ The answer, he says, is to start by letting go of the myth of originality and acknowledging that everything you write has come from something else.

Gibson pointed to the example of Bob Dylan’s songwriting process, as described in Dylan’s memoir Chronicles: Volume One. Dylan unashamedly re-worked other people’s songs and stories until, Gibson says, ‘the stuff that was already re-working (him) started to push through’.

‘Stop worrying about getting it right’, Gibson advised, ‘because there are so many things to say.’ Gibson quoted from the influential 1921 essay by T.S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in which the poet argued that the process of artistic creation ‘is a continual surrender (of oneself) to something which is more valuable.’

As for being too old to be a writer, my response to this one is usually ‘two words: Elizabeth Jolley’.  The award-winning Australian novelist didn’t publish her first novel until she was 53, and she went on to write fourteen more. One way of positively re-framing the idea of aging is to think of it as a process of gathering stories. The more stories you have gathered, the more you have to tell in your non-fiction, or to re-used and recycle in your fiction. As for too young, try two more words: Tim Winton. His first novel, An Open Swimmer, was published when Winton was only 21 and his eleventh, Eyrie, came out in 2013.

The third saboteur on the list is perhaps the hardest one to counter. Unless you are already an established literary star, there are simply no guarantees that anyone will want to publish or read your work. Deborah Robertson says, ‘In order to tolerate the doubt and the nagging internal voices and just get the words down on the page, it helps to remind myself, over and over again, that THIS IS AS BAD AS THE WRITING IS EVER GOING TO BE! It will be my job in subsequent drafts to make it better, but by then I'll know more about the work and I'll be dealing with words in front of me rather than phantoms in my head.’

You could also try using the fear of never being published to help you take more risks with your writing. A mentor of mine once advised me to ‘write as if no one is ever going to read this stuff’. It was a perfect example of what Ross Gibson described as ‘tricking yourself’ into writing, and it allowed me to write with new courage, because I had lowered the stakes for myself. 

If tricks won’t work, here are some practical strategies to help you move past your anxieties:

- Set yourself reasonable word targets each day or week.

- Use the Pomodoro system for time organisation: write (anything) for 25 minutes, then give yourself permission to stop for 5 minutes, before writing some more.

- Try doing ‘scaffolding writing’, where you write about the writing you are trying to do.

- Spend 15 minutes reading a few pages of writing from one of your favourite authors, then go straight to your desk and write.

- Read and re-read the ‘feel the love’ forms and the self-congratulatory letter you will take home today.

- Write with the thought that it’s ‘not about you’, but that your work is going to help or entertain or inspire or delight someone else.

- Write down the names of three books you’ve read and are really glad the writer made the effort to finish because they have had a positive impact on your life.

- Write a letter of congratulations to yourself that you can’t open again until you have finished the first draft of the project, acknowledging the hurdles you’ve overcome and the reasons why you should feel proud of yourself.

- Keep going because if you don’t finish the project, you may ultimately feel worse about yourself than if you keep writing in spite of the vicious taunts of your inner critic.

This essay was first published in Newswrite magazine in 2013.