Authorial Self-Confidence (Part 1) or Why writers are a little crazy (it's the voices in our heads)

Today I want to write about something which is all tangled up with who I am as a writer and which is, I think, intrinsic to the writing process: authorial self-confidence.

Even as I write this, I look at that statement: ‘authorial self-confidence’. In my head, this sounds like what I mean, but is it technically correct? There is a little flag in the back of my mind which is suggesting that ‘authorial confidence’ would usually be used within a stylistic context, to denote a particularly deftly managed voice for example. Someone cleverer than I am, more learned than I am, will pick this up in a heartbeat. For that matter, ‘in a heartbeat’ is clearly a cliché. What does it say about me as a writer that I have resorted to this over-used phrase rather than a fresh, new metaphor? And this is exactly what I mean. As writers, we become hyperaware of the words that we use and the way that they will be received by others. This can come to the point where you are afraid to write anything at all.

One of my tutors once said that to make it as a writer, you need an equal balance of arrogance and humility. There is a lot of truth to this, although I wince at the suggestion that arrogance among writers is something to be condoned, is even an essential part of the writing process. Replacing ‘arrogance’ with ‘self-belief’, however, describes in my view exactly the weird dichotomy that both plagues and strengthens most writers. To be a writer, you have to get this balance right or, forgive the dramatic but I think it’s true, it destroys you.

The humility is vitally important and is part, I think, of a constant desire to learn, to understand better and deeper the complexities and contradictions of the world around us, the things that have happened and the things that might happen. To ask ‘what if?’ or ‘why?’ requires both humility and determination: ‘I don’t know the answer, but I am going to write to find out, for myself, and so I can share what I’ve learned with you.’ Writing isn’t for me a matter of saying ‘look how much I know, now I’m going to teach you, lucky reader’ but ‘look we’re asking the same questions, and I’ve devoted a lot of time and effort to finding my own version of an answer, so please, have a look and see whether this resonates with you too.’

Along with this, humility pushes the necessary constant drive to be better than you are. If you believe that every word you write is perfect as it is, that stories fly fully formed from the genius of your brain to the page, that criticism is just from people who ‘don’t get it’ and that’s their fault, not yours, you’ll stick forever in stasis. You won’t improve because you don’t believe that you need improving and, 99.9% of the time, that’s wrong. Part of the transformative nature of writing is the moment when this thing you’ve written suddenly pulls together into the thing you hoped it might be able to be. And that’s rarely ever in the first draft.

This is where the self-belief comes in. Some people come to writing as a vocation quite late, but I am one of those who believed in me as a writer almost before I could actually write. One of my clearest early childhood memories is of standing beside my dad’s chair at the kitchen table, dictating a story and making him write it down. I’m not one of those naturally gifted with telling stories in public, to a crowd, but I was always compulsively driven to write them. And for the twenty or so years since that moment when I thought to myself ‘I am a writer, this is what I want to do with my life’, that inherent self-belief has been consistently and thoroughly battered.

And it has to be, that’s part of the process. Because being a writer is a public process, it involves constantly and relentlessly putting yourself and your precious work out into the world and, particularly I think if you are a creative writing student, putting yourself out there sometimes when you know you’re not ready. The self-belief is the little voice, buried rather deeply in a lot of us, which whispers ‘You are good at this. This piece of work may not be perfect – even if you thought it was and have just realised it isn’t – but you are capable of something really good. You know your craft, whatever anyone might say, and you can do this.’ This last bit is important and sometimes overlooked by beginning writers, you do have to get to a point where that is part of the self-belief voice, where the basics of how to tell a story well are both instinctive and understood.

The self-belief voice, in a lot of us, is a quiet one and it suffers under a mind-battering barrage of much louder self-doubt voices which, on a bad day, judge and analyse every word and every comment and take every criticism to heart. These are the opposite of arrogance, they are the crippling self-doubt which means that every single time someone ‘doesn’t get it’ it is always your fault not theirs. It’s the part of you which keeps saying, very reasonably, lining up lots of evidence for your perusal, that you’re deluding yourself if you think that perhaps, in this case, your story just hasn’t worked for that person. This self-doubt voice tells you that you’re just like those arrogant people who think they’re perfect – you just don’t want to accept the truth that you’re not good enough.

I will, on this blog and elsewhere, talk confidently about my writing process, myself as a writer, etc. The writing self-belief voice is quiet but pretty strong in me, mainly because it’s been there for a long time, it’s been tested harshly and just managed to survive so far. But that self-doubt voice is, if anything, even a little bit stronger, always at least jostling confidently for space, and it threatens to obliterate every shred of self-belief every single day. I won’t talk about it too often here for that reason – giving it too much blog-space isn’t interesting to anyone else but is also one of the surest ways to kill the self-belief.

I am aware that all of the above may sound a bit mixed up and contradictory and confusing and consist of lots of run-on sentences full of ‘ands’ like this one. But that’s what it’s like – in my head anyway. Being a writer for me is not just about putting the words on the page, it’s about constantly managing that conflict between self-belief and self-doubt every day, subduing it enough to allow me to put the words on the page.

What do you think? Does anyone else have the same experience (or am I just crazy – I am aware this is a real possibility)? How does this self-confidence war manifest itself in other art forms?

In a follow-up post, maybe next week, I want to talk about this conflict in the context of formal creative writing study, in particular this idea of presenting your work for judgment when you know that it and you aren’t ready. I should be posting to this blog much more often (I know I always say that) over the coming months – I will tell you why next time!

In which I commit to 500 words a day regardless of procrastination

This is a picture of Scotland – how I spent my summer holidays in other words. Rain and grey skies and long walks by the lochs as the sun peeked (or not) through the clouds (and one long walk/climb/soul-destroy-and-repair-maneuver up a tall tall mountain in full sunlight). Also an eerie half-light that seemed to linger all night so that you could look up from your computer (writing/Plants vs. Zombies is the best reward) at one in the morning and a timelessness had set in, a Tom’s Midnight Garden sort of moment.

Anyway, I also wrote 17,000 words of new novel which is not about Scotland but came out of a feeling in Scotland and a rather dull dream that I had just before we went but a couple of images stuck with me: an awkward but sublimely confident everyday girl in a shift dress, perched on the edge of a table in an anachronistic aristocratic household, a young man, a bit older, in evening dress, chairs tipped over but a sense of calm.

I write often from atmosphere, I think – I want to write a book that feels like this I often say to myself, the visceral is awfully important to me – I’ll close my eyes and try and sense the scene with all senses. Atmosphere, however, does not a story make, certainly not a YA novel. Characters come naturally to me but plot, oh plot my greatest enemy… But this book has a plot! It is more than characters perched on the edge of tables and chairs, it is buried treasure and political intrigue and fraud and great family secrets and a dash of romance and a dash of the sea. The plot is written!

On return from my two week July jaunt to the Highlands and Islands, I resolved to finish my novel, uninspiredly titled Shena and Robbie, now rather pompously titled Grandings (to change, I’m sure) by the end of the summer. It is now the beginning of November, and my grand total stands at 26,000 words. Not the record I might have hoped for. 9,000 words in three months is not something to be proud of.

But I shall be proud! For from now on, I have a goal of 500 words a day. There was this goal last week too and perhaps the week before, and it ended in failure. But not this time! For it has been proclaimed into Blogland and must be so.

I was going to tell you my ten tips for procrastinating when you have carefully set aside a day for writing and it is now 14:29 and not a word has been written. These included ‘Computer battery has run down. Computer charger is plugged in behind the sofa. The sofa is not the place to be for writing this afternoon’ and ‘Reading other writers’ blogs is almost as good as writing’ or even ‘my husband asked me to load the dishwasher and put the washing on the line – if I’ve done this, maybe I won’t get told off for having done no writing on my writing day…’

But I shall not do this! For writing blog posts must make the list of great procrastinations… I will, however, update you to confirm my measly 500 words, and you, I hope, will applaud loudly.

Nature - or why I will never make a nature-poet which has never saddened me until now

I first studied writing, seriously, in the woods, surrounded on either side by lakes. My writing teachers were brilliant nature poets and essayists, they wrote the poetic twists and turns of streams and the complex balancing act that is man in nature, man outside nature, man against nature. We read everyone from Gary Snyder to Jim Harrison to Mary Oliver, all writers in their way firmly connected to a wild outdoor environment.

To be honest, I got my fill of nature-writing then and there. It was something that I remembered nostalgically, as a relic from my relatively happy and intensely creative schooldays, but a habit that I never picked up.

For one thing, I am terribly unobservant when it comes to the natural world, to the point where I have sometimes worried about how anyone so obviously unobservant can ever claim to be a writer. In the Alps, bravely soldiering up mountains, I missed eagles, marmots and interestingly-shaped clouds even when given minute directions ('you see that peak over there behind the fir tree... no?). Recently, I have been trying to rectify my abysmal knowledge of trees and flowers on the basis that specificity in writing is important when setting a scene and that the lovely heroine leaning against a silver birch twirling a crimson crysanthemum while waiting for her lover is a more evocative scene then, say, the girl sat under a tree holding a flower. I've made an effort to learn the leaves and bark of the basics - oaks, beeches, horse chestnut, the most confusing rowan and mountain ash. I am ashamed, however, to admit that so far I can only identify by cheating: if it has acorns, or prickly conker shells, I can manage, otherwise they mix themselves up in my head. I can give you a list of trees, and I can see a tree and know that it is familiar, but never do these two trains of thought end up on the same bit of track.

This has all come about because, after gleefully abandoning reading about nature throughout my undergraduate degree, I have plunged myself into a creative writing MA that starts off with three books about the natural world and the wider concept of wilderness and wildness. Beautifully written, intensely thoughtful and perceptive, this is personal creative nonfiction that seems to test all of my reading abilities. Normally a fast reader, even in study mode, it's taken me weeks to get through the first one and a half books. My mind drifts in the spaces between paragraphs, a philosophical point will send me off on a tangent that brings me back two or three pages later when I realise I haven't taken in a word. The effort of concentration has put me to sleep more than once. It is incredibly frustrating - today, I read a few pages of Robert Macfarlane's The Wild Places aloud to focus my thoughts and I was impressed by the sheer brilliance and rightness of the language, the description of Irish limestone as coated in pewter, the red berries against white snow in a Scottish forest. It is a beautiful book and Macfarlane has much wider messages about our relationship to nature and our very understanding of the wild places in the world. But I miss so much, seemingly inadvertently, me who can reel off characters and plots and family relationships from books I read years ago.

I think perhaps that it is because I feel an outsider in this world. I want desperately to understand this relationship with the natural world, this feeling of seeing it from the inside out. I go lightheaded in the outdoors - last weekend, dead-tired after endless days at work, I spent a few hours outside in unusually glorious English sunshine in my in-laws' garden a steep hill overflowing with colour and steps made of slate. I lay in the hammock, half-aware of bird song, with my sunglasses, reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, a densely exuberant exploration of a year at the author's Virginia home. Dillard muses passionately on everything from the lifecycles of cicadas to the sheer fecundity of nature to the experience of patting a dog at a gas station. She writes with wonder and both an intensity of focus and a lightspeed zoom outwards looking at the natural world from all angles and all distances.

The sun often affects me strangely, and that afternoon I tried to absorb bits of Tinker Creek in a daze. I spent hours outdoors and I could not tell you what flowers I saw, what birds I heard, or really what words I read. I have a vision of it, vague, powerful and lightheaded with a sunstruck headache. I deeply admire this writing, this sort of depth of understanding, of seeing a tree and recognising it not just for its name but also for its mechanics and its cycle through the seasons. I blame, perhaps, my abysmal scientific education, but this all comes back to the same problem - the science I learned didn't stick.

I don't want to sell myself too short. When I stand on one of the Dartmoor tors (that expanse of moorland wilderness is something for another entry, the openess that I miss crammed in between hedgerows, that ability to breathe that you don't always know you've lost) or smell the salt of the sea when the waves hit the side of my train to work in the morning, I want desperately to write it, to capture the feeling of that breath, that wildness, what it means to be a person in that world. I want that Anne Hathaway rose-covered cottage in the country, I get absurdly excited when my tomato plants bear fruit. But I find an allure to nature mainly as setting, almost a persistent anthropomorphic backdrop, as the Yorkshire moors are to Heathcliff and Cathy or, conversely, to little Mary Lennox with her secret garden. I think, for me, it's the natural world as metaphor and as atmosphere that interests me most, and it depresses me that I can't seem to appreciate a world without characters.

Jay Griffith's Wild is proving the easiest read for me although it's possibly the most complex of the three in many ways. It's because, sad as it is to admit it, it's scattered throughout with people that I can latch onto, people as reference points for the wild, and people are something I feel I can understand.

*Notice the abandon with which this entry is written however - perhaps a bit of this joy in the world, this intense way of seeing, this unselfconscious wonder has started to rub off after all.

It's always ourselves we find at the sea

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea

- e.e. cummings

I'm finally recovering from being ill and Simon and I went for a short walk by the sea this afternoon. Our shoes and socks ended up soaked through, but I always find the sea inspirational, awesome in the correct sense of the word. The rhythm of the waves is always calming, and eventually it feels as though you are breathing and your heart is beating in time.

This is one of my very favourite poems, first read in a much-loved fat book of children's poems that my grandparents gave me (one of the best of its kind I think, I wish I could remember what it was called.) I've always wanted to write a story out of this poem, and recently I've begun little fragments of one on my train journey to work that runs right along the coast. It's the story of four adult sisters who move, for the autumn, to a house by the sea. Think The Ghost and Mrs Muir meets The Sea, The Sea - but not at all of course because I've drawn on a lot of different threads in my past to create these characters: trans-Atlantic experience, close families, both east and west coasts of England, and much of the material feels very real and familiar to me. As with all of my writing these days, I can't seem to keep short, and I think it's a roughly 80,000 word novel in the making rather than a short story, although I'm really using this as a de-stressing exercise rather than a serious project. It makes a nice break from the rewrites for Glass and Ice, my first novel which is a mammoth children's fantasy that needs major work (and that I do find very stressful.)

But I like the rhythms of the sea, and my 'maggie and millie and mollie and may' story (tentatively called 'Whatever We Lose') is as therapeutic for me. It's something I can work on when I walk along the beach and just feel the need to write that wind-sea-sky feeling down.

New things

I feel that I need an emptier new blog for a more adult me. I started my LiveJournal when I was a 16 year old boarding school student, immersed in writing and teenage angst in the deep snows of Northern Michigan. Now, it is suddenly 7 years later. I have a different name and a different accent, and I live in a country where snow rarely falls, and never here so close to the sea.

At the moment, I'm stuck in a cycle of working, eating, sleeping, and more working, obsessing about writing but not doing it. I need something to remind me that there's still creativity left in the tired me that comes home from work every night. I have lovely life, really, but I do so little with it! This blog is to encourage me to do something - and make me appreciate the things I already do.

And there is a literal (but not metaphorical) ocean between myself and my family that I'd like to bridge. My sister said to me the other day that the hardest part of being so far away is thinking "What is Amelia doing today?" and not having any idea what to picture. So this is for that too. To give the people I miss somewhere to imagine me.

So here's to inspiration and adventures and optimism (this is not a blog for me to complain about my life.) Wish me luck!