The Greatest/Worst Book Ever Written

It's a busy blog hopping week for me! Aside from starting my own, I've joined one as well: the Insecure Writer's Support Group. It seemed like the perfect fit for me, you know, since I'm just chock full of insecurity. Visit Alex J. Cavanaugh's blog if you'd like to join, too! 

So what I'd like to talk about are the ups and downs of writing a novel. The feeling you have one day that this is the best idea anyone's ever come up with in the history of forever, and then the feeling you have the next day that you've written absolute crap that will never amount to anything. Which thought process is right? How do you deal with this roller coaster of insecurity?

I have this problem all of the time. When I first wrote my WIP as a short story, I thought it was the greatest thing I'd ever written. I gave it out to friends, handed it in for a college workshop. I thought I was brilliant. Now I can't even stand to read a sentence of it. The fact that so many other people have read it still bothers me. The novel version has the same characters and same basic plot--but still, it feels light years away from the original. But how can something be perfect one day and then horrible the next?

I think it has a lot to do with creative energy. When you're first getting your ideas down, it's exciting; it's like a purge of all of the ideas in your head. There's nothing quite like it. You'll come up with a sentence in your head and think, "Oh, that's brilliant!" and getting it down onto paper or the computer and actually seeing it before your eyes is thrilling. But once that sentence sits around for a while, you might not find it so brilliant anymore. You might see several ways to rewrite it, or you may want to scrap it altogether.

But when are you right? When you started and thought you were a genius? Or when you look back and see how horrible it is?

If you only listen to your pessimistic side, then you'd probably want to give up every other day and not bother writing at all because you're so horrible at it. If you only listen to the optimistic side, though, once you start trying to get published, you may become overly frustrated because you can't understand how these agents or publishers just aren't getting your genius! See the problem? Neither side is right, but neither is wrong. You need both to balance each other out. You need to have confidence in yourself and your writing. But you also need some self-doubt in there, too. How will you ever be able to edit if you can't see any flaws in your work? You need part of yourself to tell you that something isn't working, but you also need that part to tell you when you get it right.

The way I like to think about it (especially as I'm only writing my first draft), is that I know that something isn't right, but I just don't know how to fix it yet. Make a note of all the things you want to fix, but don't get too frustrated or give up just because it seems like a lot of work. And give yourself some credit. Highlight those sentences that really do work and try to see why they are so perfect. It just might help you figure out the rest.