The Blank Page: How to Start Writing and Overcome Self-Doubt
It’s a difficult thing to be a writer—both in practice and by label.
While I write more often than not, I don’t have any significant accolades as the few publications under my belt didn’t achieve much merit. To my own mind, I’m not a writer but rather a person who writes.
Even now and again, suffering from the awfulness of imposter syndrome, my partner tries to reassure who I am. She reasons that even though none of my work thus far has garnered any awards, even though most of my submissions are rejections, I am still, in fact, a writer. Not just some schmuck who writes. “You still have plenty of time,” she tells me. I nod and hold her, grateful for the kindness and support she offers on a daily basis.
Yet that nasty feeling lingers atop my shoulders and reminds me: You turn 29 in a month. Despite knowing that some of the greatest writers—William Faulkner, Sylvia Plath, Ray Bradbury, Amy Tan, Toni Morrison—didn’t publish their first books until they were 29 or older, despite that I’ve published two books before turning 29, it doesn’t feel like enough to have earned the title of writer.
I sit here, at my desk, trying to write about overcoming self-doubt (imposter syndrome), yet I struggle to find the adequate words and the courage to declare that I am, whole-heartedly, a writer.
Perhaps that’s okay. Afterall, I’m still writing, aren’t I?
Take Time to Recognize Your Self-Doubt
It’s a troubling subject to consider, the concept of self-doubt in writers. In part, I believe, because so many writers suffer from it. Writers who are well-established, known for their successes. But even they, every now and then, encounter a moment where they doubt themselves, their abilities, as writers.
And though I may struggle with my own self-doubt, there are ways that I’ve confronted that have helped ease the tension. I recognize it—put a name to the feeling.
If I sit and stare at a blank page for too long, I know there’s something more going on under the surface; a part of me isn’t able to quiet. When this happens, I take a step back from whatever it is that I’m working on and try to reflect: Okay, brain. What’s going on up there? How are you doing today? Why is there a hold up? What did I forget to take care of before sitting down? Taking a few moments to put a name to what is going on upstairs in my head can make all the difference for how I approach, not just the writing, but the rest of the day. The implications, for me, as I’m sure for others as well, carry well past the time spent at any desk or book.
Make Space for Mistakes
Some mornings, after I read a short story or two, there’s that surge of motivation—call it creative inspiration—which pushes me to write. But when I open up my notebook (I find that handwriting drafts slows me down and better connects me to the work, and it leaves less room for distractions), there are times when I can’t seem to scratch a single letter. The opening sentence of that fantastic story I read not long ago loops inside my brain.
No longer is there space, whether I know it or not, for me to make mistakes and play around with my writing. That opening sentence, the first paragraph, how perfect it was and how hard it hit, there’s no way I can compete with it. Just give up, I think to myself. It’s already been done better than you could ever.
Sure. There’s probably some truth to that. The thing is, it’s not my work. It’s not my story. While mine might pale in comparison to that fantastic story, those great first sentences, it’s not what I have created, and that, to me, is sometimes the reaffirmation enough to get the pen scribbling.
And it comes down to simply allowing myself the space to just have fun with the words, the structure, the way the language interacts. Far and few have great writers gotten it right on the first go. Make your mistake. Have some laughs along the way. If you don’t have fun with what you're doing, then why do it at all?
A Writing Exercise From George Saunders
Another tool I’ve turned to in times of prolonged droughts of writing are books on craft. Most include exercises intended to get the creative juices flowing.
A Swim in the Pond in the Rain was one such craft book that I finished a couple months back. In it, George Saunders offers up his insight on writing as he walks the reader through a handful of Russian stories and provides background on their lives. It’s a masterclass in creative writing, all bundle in one fun, humorous, and easy-to-read journey.
Throughout the book (as well as in the back), Saunders provides some of the writing exercises he shares with his students at Syracuse University, where he teaches.
Below is one such exercise that focuses on what Saunders refers to as escalation or rising action. Give it a read. Give it a try. You might just surprise yourself.
An Escalation Exercise
Exercise
Set a timer for, let’s say, forty-five minutes.
Now write a 200-word story. BUT the trick is: you get to use only fifty words to do it.
You’ll discover your own way of keeping track of the word count; one approach is to make a running list. Say, for example, that your first sentence turns out to be “A cow stood in the field.”
You write, at the bottom of the page, for reference:
a
cow
stood
in
the
field
Now you “have” those six words to use going forward.
When you hit fifty words, that’s it: you have to start reusing words. (Let’s allow plurals. So “cow” and “cows” count as the same word.)
The final product is to be exactly 200 words (not 199, not 201).
Ready? Go.
Discussion
Most writers tend to write stories that are long on exposition but never ascend into the rising action (that is, they don’t escalate). I’ve read entire student novels like this—pages and pages of brilliant exposition in which the tension never rises. I sometimes say that in the exposition we put a pot of water on the stove; getting the action to rise is making the water boil. (What we’ve been calling “meaningful action” is equal to boiling water is equal to escalation.)
For reasons I don’t understand, the stories produced using this exercise almost always have rising action. For certain students, they tend to be funnier and more entertaining and more dramatically shaped than those writers’ “real” work.
If you like the piece you wrote—if it seems to have something your more seriously produced stories lack—you might pause here and ask what that is, exactly.
Why does this exercise work? I’m not sure. The constraints have something to do with it (the 50-limit word and the exacting—200, not 199, not 201—word count). When a person is doing this exercise, her attention is on those constraints, which means she’s approaching things differently than she normally would. The part of her mind that would usually be thinking about her themes or preserving her style or the piece’s goal or her politics is being kept busy counting words. Which allows another part of her mind to step forward, a less conscious, more playful part.
When I assign this exercise in class, I announce beforehand that everyone will be reading their story aloud afterward. This intensifies things. (“Depend upon it sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”) This brings out a natural performative streak that just about every writer I know has.
When I was a student at Syracuse, Doug Unger, a little fed up with how clever and “literary” the stories we’d been writing were, announced, just before a break in workshop, that during the second half we were each going to have to tell a story on the spot.
Talk about a nerve-filled break.
But compared to the stories we’d been submitting, the stories we told that night were, without exception, livelier and more dramatic and more infused with who we really were, richer with our real charms, the way we actually were witty in the world.
What is there to do with the little pieces that result from this exercise? They usually sound a little strange, Seussian. Once a student made a larger story out of several passes at this exercise; in each pass he used a different fifty-word set, but he kept the same characters throughout the longer story he made of those 200-word bits. Other students have used this exercise to generate a sort of starter piece, with good rising action, then relaxed the constraints and rewrote the story using as many “new” words as they wanted.
The beauty of this exercise is that it shows us that we usually walk around with a certain idea of the writer we are in our head. When we sit down to write, that writer is the one we start channeling. In that instant, our brain function changes. We’re less open to what the story wants to do, to what the language generator inside of us wants to do. We’re working within the narrow range of how we think we should write. This exercise shuts down that way of thinking by keeping it busy with the practicalities of the exercise, which leaves the rest of the mind asking, “Well, what else have we got?” That is: “What other writers might be in here?”
Maybe this exercise is a bit like dancing while drunk and filming it. In playback, we might catch a glimpse of something we don’t normally attempt, but that we like. And if we like it, we might want to do it on purpose, later.
from A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, Appendix B, pgs. 400-402.
