Tricks to Overcome Self-Doubt, Part I
Shutting Up Your Self-Critic
I’m going to do this in two parts because I wrote more than I intended to. If you are a person who wishes you could sit down on demand and write more than you intended to, I have some good news. A big hurdle in the ability to do just that is self-doubt—the belief that you may not be able to do something, or to do it well, even if you try your best.
Self-doubt is a constant companion of many creative people. This is because when you do a creative thing you have to surgically cut yourself open, take something from within, and make that thing part of the world outside yourself where people can see it and poke it. This is obviously terrifying and no one should ever do that. Thank you for reading Shelf Life, it has been a pleasure to write for you.
Look, we are all Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov and writing is our mission to Antarctica. We think we’re headed to the south pole to do research and see emperor penguins and stuff but actually we’re going on a journey of self-appendectomy. Surgeons have big egos. They have to, it’s required to do their job (cutting people open). Writers, likewise, need to have some of the characteristics of a big ego. We have to believe that we can tell a story well enough that people want to read it. A big reason people give up on writing is self-doubt: The belief that they cannot, actually, tell a story well enough that someone would want to read it.
This belief comes in many forms. It might be the belief that one will share their writing and receive criticism. Or the belief that one’s work will not be selected for traditional publication. Or the belief that traditional publication will result in a flop that doesn’t make any money. All these things are possible. In fact, all of them are probable.
It’s a safe bet there will be criticism of any published work. There will be negative Amazon and Goodreads reviews—even humanity’s most treasured books have some. Maybe, if you’re very lucky, a big-name book critic will read your book and hate it and write about it in the New York Times. Maybe high school students will write book reports, one day, about how little they liked reading you.
Most manuscripts that get written are not chosen for traditional publication. That’s just a numbers game. Many more books are self-published each year than are traditionally published. Many more manuscripts than that are written and never published at all. Further, of the books that are published, most do not go on to become bestsellers or make a lot of money for the author or publisher. The traditional publishing model banks on its few runaway successes to subsidize its many flops.
None of those things mean a writer has failed, unless that specific writer, personally, defines failure for themself as receiving criticism, or on not securing a traditional publishing contact, or on their book’s financial performance. Regardless, a lot of people look at their chances of being the next Stephen King or JK Rowling and don’t like those odds and give up before they start.
There’s also a lot of people who are completely certain they’re going to be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling, to the extent that they don’t want to hear anything about the industry or any advice on writing, but I’m not speaking to those people in today’s Shelf Life because they’re not reading anyway.
If you want to write, or you write and you want to publish, but self-doubt is standing in between you and your dream, then I have some handy advice on deck you can use to conquer it. Let’s imagine that your self-doubt is an infected appendix, and you are Russian surgeon Leonid Rogozov, and this Shelf Life is an emergency self-appendectomy. Let’s surgically excise our self-doubt and yeet it into the Southern Ocean.
(Yeet is an officially recognized word.)
First: Shut up your critical inner voice.
Nothing torpedoes your self confidence like a running monologue between your ears telling you how horrible you are in every way. A lot of people have this. You can tell when people have this, too, even from your vantage point outside their skull, because the self-criticism spills out sometimes when their is too much for their brain’s bone prison to contain, and they say things like “I’m such an idiot” or “I can’t believe how stupid I am” when they make a simple mistake.
I’m convinced that some people get so used to the presence of this self-critical inner voice that they don’t notice it, even when asked to consider that they may have one. This is classic Kurt Vonnegut–“Welcome to the Monkey House”–syndrome wherein they’ve been standing in the metaphorical monkey house so long they can’t smell it anymore.
If you have a critical inner voice that trash talks every little thing you do, that is definitely going to contribute to a sense of self-doubt. Like this is a primary cause. I believe the best thing anyone can do to mitigate self-doubt—about anything!—is to train themself out of the negative self-talk habit.
Therapy can help with this—like the best thing to do is jump in a time machine and go back to the beginning of your adult life and start therapy—but you can work on this nasty habit on your own, too. You just have to get good at listening to and noticing your thoughts. I have good news: If you want to be a writer, you also have to get good at listening to and noticing your thoughts because writing those thoughts down is literally the thing you do to be a writer. So the skill is probably already in your wheelhouse.
When you notice negative self-talk, whether it is aloud or in your head, stop what you are doing and address the negative self-talk. Like, for example, if I see myself in the mirror and I casually think (or say) to myself, “ugh I look awful today,” I will stop right there and correct my self-critical inner voice. If I catch it in the act, I will say (or think), “That’s not true at all. I look fine. I look great actually.”
Pretend your self-critical inner voice is a kindergarten playground bully and you are the full-grown adult teacher in charge of correcting their poor behavior. Parents and teachers have to do this with kids in order for them to grow up to be civilized human beings. You want your inner monologue voice to also be a civilized human being. Trust me on this.
Self-Critical Inner Voice: “Wow this writing is bad.”
You: “That’s not very nice and no one asked for your opinion anyway.”
Second: Make a firm decision about validation.
You get to decide the source from which you derive validation. That’s it, that’s the whole section. Thank you for coming to my Shelf Talk.
You can get validation from others or you can get validation from yourself. You do not have to accept that the only true source of validation is external. If other people enjoy your writing, that’s great—but you need not rely upon others approval. Your self-doubt may express itself like this:
“No one will want to read this.”
“This isn’t as good as [some other book you’ve read].”
“People won’t buy my book.”
“No agent will sign something like this.”
Those beliefs put the responsibility for validating the worthiness of your writing on external sources—like readers, purchasers, agents—or base it on comparison with somebody else’s book.
First of all, there’s zero value in comparing the quality of your book or manuscript against someone else’s book or manuscript. If you must compare your manuscript to something, compare it to your previous manuscripts and determine whether your writing is improving with practice. That might be a valuable exercise. There’s no reason to judge your writing based on someone else’s writing. It’s unhelpful.
Second, the only validation you need is your own. You’re part of the reading public. Would you read this? Would you buy it? If you were an agent, would you sign it? You can’t judge your work based on the way you imagine others might react to it.
You cannot know that no one will want to publish, or read, or buy your book until you shop the manuscript to agents or make the book available for sale. You can’t do those things until you have written the book. Therefore, if you allow the possibility that a book won’t be successful to prevent you from writing the book, you’ll never write the book. The possibility will always exist until the book is written.
In other words, don’t allow the need for external validation—or the fear that you will not receive it—to determine whether or not you should write.
Good news: You, yourself, are also an excellent source of validation. Put aside your thoughts about who might or might not want to read or buy for another day. Seek your own validation. Reread what you wrote. Do you like it? If not, do you see it shaping up into something you could eventually like? Great. That’s it, that’s all you need. I highly recommend you stop caring what anyone else thinks. It’s very freeing. I am no longer talking about writing specifically.
This is where I’m cutting it off today because I have five steps to overcoming self-doubt (do I make it sound easy?) and with the preamble this is probably, like, half? So please come back Tuesday for the other three things because they’re really good.
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