Five ways to fall in love with your project and manage your doubts

Who wants to read my novel? No one is interested in what I have to say. Sound familiar? All writers struggle with self-doubt. Generating ideas and pages is often exciting, but there are bound to be days when you struggle and possibly even hate your work. This is another aspect of the craft of writing. We have to learn to manage the expectations you have for yourself and your project. The key is to use the energy it takes to put forth such ideas to further fuel your project despiteyour doubts. Sound daunting? It isn’t. Here are five quick ways to fall back in love with your project.

Step one: Figure out what you love about your project. If it’s language, isolate a page from your piece and identify actual words that you like. Jot them down. Take note of the color and sound and texture or whatever else you find appealing about these words. If you are drawn to the plot of your piece, select a page and see if there are any particular lines that shimmer. Use these places to reinsert yourself into the piece.

Step two: Read something you love and let yourself enjoy the process of reading for pleasure. 

Step three: Read your own work like an editor. What is unique about your way of looking at things? Go through several pages of your manuscript and then jot a couple observations. How can you deepen this throughout your pages? 

Step four: “Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them,” Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes says. Without a sense of discovery, a creative piece will lack urgency and interest—both yours AND the readers. The best writing is less about acquiring wisdom and more about exploring.  Reread several pages of your project and make a list of questions you have. Do any pull at you? Can you answer any of them now? What begs to be explored on paper?

Step five: Take a break. Call a friend. Each chocolate. Go for a walk or darn socks. When you focus on another task altogether, the analytical side of your brain is put on hold and the right side can do what it does best—create ideas and worlds that intrigue. 

“Most of us go on without a vision. We are bereft of the experience that ravishes and transforms. We cling to what is dear to us; we safeguard it under lock and key. We are leery of the surrender that it takes to write. We want to have our vision before we begin, before we lift the knife to slay what we love, our cherished egos, our desire to be excellent. We want them back before we give them us. Not later, but now we want our vision. Not as reward but at guarantee.” 

Bonnie Friedman from Writing Past Dark

A sad fact is the more you know about your project, the more likely you are to censor yourself. Yet perseverance and commitment count for more than you imagine. So be kind to yourself. If you find yourself frustrated, put your work away. Exercise. Take a walk. See how movement can help you solve your writing dilemmas. And let yourself play—bring your imagination into the room. Return to whatever initially inspired you and cup that in your hands. Have faith. 

Go on, share

My dad has been sick for a few months now. It started with a loss of hearing and then a visit to the ENT, and a biopsy that showed cancer. I’ve taken to try and visit him once a week and bring some cookies baked by my daughter, maybe a Tupperware of soup. I leave my worries in my car, as much as I am able, and we talk. This past week was one of those amazing spring days with generous blocks of sun, a warm breeze..

He had been reclining in his armchair when I arrived, and I encouraged him to join me outside. Okay, he said.

He opened two lawn chairs for us and we sat outside their house. Helicopters rained down on us and my mom’s flowering shrubs shook their heads at us. We didn’t talk. A wind chime trilled in the distance and from somewhere bubbled up a memory from the second grade when Sister Sandra walked our class across the church parking lot to the house she shared with Sister Dorothy Clare. I told my dad how they directed us into the backyard and I remember sitting on my knees in the grass, eating a drumsicle. It was the first time I’d ever had one, and I remember peeling off the paper wrapper to take a bite of the sugar cone. It was late May, a day like this one, I shared, and I remember the smell of the lilacs and the warm breeze, and the sweet ice cream.

I could feel him listening to me. Maybe remembering when I was that age. Maybe remembering when he was that age himself. Really, I have no idea what was going on, but I could sense his interest and delight at hearing this little memory, one he made possible, whether he realizes it or not.

Be your own cheerleader

I don’t talk about my cheerleading days with many, but they existed back in 6th grade. We wore green polyester skirts and gold vests emblazoned with three embroidered letters in green: SAS for Saint Ann’s School. In the fall I stood with my friends and fellow cheerleaders rooting from the sidelines of a football game and in the winter, we yelled for the boys on the basketball team to “fire it up!” on the court.

I don’t remember having any grand aspirations to become a cheerleader. I wanted to hang out with my friends, but that one glimpse into the life of a cheerleader taught me how important it is to have folks rooting for you.

Now, firmly in middle-age, I’ve returned to these cheerleading roots as a way to appreciate myself. Writers are so good at getting down on themselves—there is always another rejection, a peer whose work you consider on par with your own receives the award you both applied to, How can you appreciate yourself? Be your cheerleader.

Rather than waiting for others’ approval of your work, give it to yourself.

• Try and take note of the good. Consider keeping a gratitude journal that highlights the fan letter you received or the glowing compliment from a peer on how you described your character in a recent submission.

• When your mind begins to go off the deep end of negativity, repeat a buzz word or phrase to recenter you. For instance, I have a little rock a friend gave me with the word TRUST painted on the front. Sometimes that word alone can right me.

• Surround yourself with support. Your dog, your girlfriends, your college roommate—these are the kinds of folks who know you outside your writing life, and that should not be underestimated.

• Treat yourself. Brownie? Check. Good tea? Check? Remember that you work hard and you deserve to be treated kindly—be this for yourself.

• Lastly, try not to compare. There will always be another writer whose accomplishments overshadow yours. Work on celebrating your own successes by noticing what YOU do—only you. Pick up those pom-poms and start honoring yourself, one cheer at a time.

Revising vs. Rewriting

In 2012 wrote an essay about a challenging time in my family when someone dear to me was diagnosed with cancer. And I spent the next three years writing several additional drafts. I hired an editor and shared another version with her. I was simply determined to get it “right”—whatever that meant.

I mean that I wanted to do the experience justice. I wanted to delve into the heartache, the uncertainty, the agony and moments of joy. And I wanted readers to have this same experience as they read the piece.

But I could never say exactly what I wanted to say. Perhaps that is because I was trying to craft something from a time that was very much in-process. I didn’t yet have the perspective I needed in order to say what needed to be said. Sometime during 2016,I put the essay away.

Fast forward to December 2020. I am in bed and I wake to the sound of my husband’s shower. It’s dark outside, the moon etching space around the blinds and suddenly, I begin thinking about death and that fact that someday my loved ones will die. It’s less than 20 degrees outside when I make myself a cup of coffee and sit down at my desk, a fresh pad of paper before me. I don’t think about that old cancer essay, but suddenly that is what I am exploring yet again, but from a greater sense of the past and present.

Writing the piece felt good like slipping on a favorite sweater after a season or three spent in a closet.

All this to say, sometimes it pays to rewrite.

You can take a draft and fine tune the paragraphs. You can rearrange the events, develop a character and heighten the tension, but sometimes it pays to put the whole thing away and rewrite it. What you draft may be fresh and startling and surprise even you.

Finding your voice

Ever know what you want to write, only you can’t find a way forward? Maybe you’ve got the idea, you can see the scenes, perhaps even pick up on some of the sensory details, but you can’t quite find the path you need to make your piece flow?

I’ve been working on a series of researched vignettes for a collection of essays and yet I’m still not there. It’s like I’m pushing one of those old fashioned ploughs through the driest of soils. I just can’t get any traction and if there’s one thing a writer needs it is the sense that she is making progress. Tiny movements—but progress regardless.

So I thought I would share with you a few tips for how I’m navigating this time in hopes you might find it beneficial as well.

• Write to your best friend. Not really, but imagine you are telling this story to your best friend. It might just help you find the tone you need to write the piece you imagine.

• Read (or reread) the work of authors whose language or characters excite you and are particularly evocative. Sharon Olds, JoAnn Beard, Michelle Hoover, Alice Munro, Charles Baxter, Dan Chaon— I could keep going. These are the authors who enthrall me and whose books time and again do not disappoint. Make your own list. Still not sure who might be on that list? Check out the covers of books you’ve enjoyed to see who is blurbing said books and you just might find your next favorite author

• You've written other pieces that have worked—pieces that you love and others were moved by as well. Can you isolate what it is that you are doing in that piece?

• Change up the form. Could this story be a poem? A hermit-crab essay? Sometimes even white space will change my approach toward a piece.

• So much about finding your voice is feeling comfortable in your skin and writing the way that only you can. This is most trying when you feel you’ve lost your way. But like many of us have been forced to do at one time or another, you need to fake it. Keep sitting down at your desk, keep working to become the best that you can at your craft and you’ll get there. Both of us will