How to Cope with Writer’s Self Doubt

I would start writing, and then say, “This is no good. No good at all.”

Does that sound familiar? In an interview in April’s The Writer, playwright Christopher Durang explains how he coped with those nagging feelings that all writers get:

After my mother passed way, I got a commission from the Phoenix Theatre… At the time, I said I was going to write a play in which everyone in the world was in therapy with the same therapist. I thought it was funny, but when I started to write it, I couldn’t make it work. I would start writing, then say, “This is no good at all.” I would stop and go to the movies or call someone up for lunch. I kept doing that, and it was terrible. I got scared. I had a commission. I had to force myself to write two or three hours a day, and I had to keep going even if I didn’t like it. I could jump ahead to a different scene, but that was the rule. And I did do that. When I would get that feeling of “This is no good,” I would get up and pace a bit. I did keep going. What I found was the next day, I would look at it, and two things tended to happen. one was, “Oh, this is actually better than I thought. I was being too hard on myself. Or, “Oh, this has some good stuff, but I see I was going in this other direction, and it is not a good idea.”

It’s reassuring to know that any writer at any stage can be plagued with self doubt, isn’t it?

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is the author of In the Context of Love: a new contemporary fiction about love, lust, and family secrets.

Angelica Schirrick had always suspected there was something deeply disturbing about her family, but the truth was more than she bargained for.