When Voices of Doubt Shake Your Confidence, How do You Pick up the Pen and Keep Writing?

Yesterday I had trouble writing. Part of it was the specific impracticalities of how I scheduled my day, taking a day-trip to Ann Arbor to meet friends and spending hours there chit-chatting and catching up. Also, I ate an obscenely large Reuben from Zingerman’s that wiped me out.

I should have known better.

You get the stuff done early, then enjoy the rest of your day. But years of working a 9-5 job have conditioned me to use evenings for writing.

I was vulnerable, though, after reminiscing with friends and realizing how much time has passed since first I dreamed of being a successful writer. Once home in the evening, I drank coffee and went upstairs to write.

I have a fine writing studio, now, and my wife napped downstairs. The dogs had been exercised, so all I had to do was write.

The witches caught me, though, and led me astray, and I squandered the time dinking around on the Internet.

One of my teachers warned us about the witches, these voices in your head that whisper to you about failure and doom. _You’ll never succeed_, they say. _Don’t bother. Go watch television and enjoy the precious time you have left._

The witches can derail projects, throw your good ideas out the window, and render you unable to write for months or even years. Worse yet, they can infect your mind at the subconscious level and sabotage your words, tossing aside the bold language and creative urges that might raise your work to another level.

But the witches can be defeated.

The teacher’s advice for dealing with witches was to address them directly and journal about the fears they invoke, and the vulnerabilities they exploit.

It’s not an immediate fix. You can’t throw a switch and banish them. It’s takes time.

The good part is that it can make you a stronger writer (artist, actor, whatever) by confronting them. You shine a light on your worries, and force the witches to openly state what the failure will mean.

This is how you do it…

In your journal, write about those fears, and what could possibly happen if the worst case scenario comes to pass. For instance, what if you write a bad novel? The worst part is that no agent or publisher will acquire your work. Should you self-publish, you might get some bad reviews, and then no one else will read your work.

But that’s it. You won’t be hunted down and pilloried by the Christo-Nationalists (at least not yet).

The upside of this scenario is that you will have learned about writing a novel, and perhaps gained insight from the reviews. You’ll have the potential of becoming a better writer because of it.

With that knowledge documented in your journal, you might be able to silence the witches and continue on your project.

I’ve been there and back again with the witches, so I knew what was going on last night. I also knew a good night sleep would help.

I pivoted my work to research some material for my next novel, sorted through my ideas, and drew a cartoon for an upcoming humor piece I’ll submit soon.

I didn’t need to journal in that moment, but I addressed the witches in my morning pages when I woke up. I felt much better about things, and was confident today would go better.

And it has.

NOTE: The image, The Four Witches by Dürer, is in the public domain and was provided by the Cleveland Art Museum