Andrew Roe

“Ethan, how are those strawberries?”

“Gloomy.”

I’ve heard it said that doubt is a good thing for a writer — that if you don’t have doubts about your writing then there’s probably something wrong.

There’s this John Irving quote:

“If you don’t feel that you are possibly on the edge of humiliating yourself, of losing control of the whole thing, then probably what you are doing isn’t very vital. If you don’t feel like you are writing somewhat over your head, why do it? If you don’t have some doubt of your authority to tell this story, then you are not trying to tell enough.”

So that helps. But doubt can also be crippling. It can be overwhelming. And then sometimes I have doubts about my doubts.

Fellow writers (if you’re out there): how do you deal with your writerly doubts?

J. Robert Lennon offers this shocking exposé in the L.A. Times.

The article is about writers and “writing time” and how they spend it (often, alas, not writing). He also points that writers are always working, which explains why we can be so distracted and spacey sometimes.

I like this part:

“If you are a child, and your writer parent is scolding you for failing to do your homework, and then he or she suddenly stops, blinks twice, and tells you to go spend the rest of the afternoon playing video games and eating Pirate Booty, then he or she is actually working.”

And this:

“To allow our loved ones to know that we are working when we are supposed to be engaged in the responsibilities of ordinary life would mark us as the narcissists and social misfits we are. And so we have invented ‘writing time’ as a normalizing concept, to shield ourselves from the critical scrutiny we deserve.”

A brief essay by Joshua Henkin resonates (via Glimmer Train).