Drawing from the Well
Queries Sent: 2
Total Queries: 13
Scenes Arranged: 4
Total Scenes: 221
I’m back, baby! It feels so good to make progress on all fronts yesterday. No, it wasn’t the 12-scene day I had a while back, but it’s getting me closer to the goal (that being the next waypoint through my book: the Midpoint). It just feels good to break out of zero-scene days. Now to create some momentum by doing it again.
Filling the Well
Elegy: Page 67 of 89
The Devouring Gray: 80%
I’m chewing through The Devouring Gray at a staggering pace. There’s only a couple of hours left on the audiobook and I can’t wait to see what happens. Herman has done a wonderful job creating numerous plot threads and I wonder which will be tied up in this book and which will dangle into the sequel.
Polishing the Well
My wife and I are making our way through Lost (as I’ve mentioned a couple of times) and the fifth season is my favorite so far. Whether it’s…well, I’m not going to get into details. If you haven’t watched it, you should. I totally get the phenomenon with it. I’m curious what my reaction will be when I get to the end. I know the fanbase was pretty split on “we got all the answers we need” and “we didn’t get all the answers we wanted.” We’ll see where I land.
Well Chat
Levels of Doubt
Being an artist of any kind comes coupled with mountains of doubt. I want to explore the various intensities of doubt over the next few days, but today I want to lay out the levels of doubt as I see them. This will be from an author’s perspective because, well, that’s what I am. I hope that the things I discuss in this series will be applicable to whatever your art is. Here we go:
- Semantic Doubt: This is the doubt that comes up when you are littered with confidence, but something seems off in your creation. I call it Semantic because for me this often comes down to word choice or sentence structure rather than a larger issue.
- Structural Doubt: When major problems with your work rise up to greet you, you’re experiencing Structural Doubt. I often talk about my books like a body and to that end, this level of doubt comes up when there’s a problem with the bones. The ideas are wrong. The lines are wrong. The undercarriage is unsteady. However it presents itself through your art, it will take some significant work to realign things.
- Foundational Doubt: Something is wrong with the heart of your work. At the core or basest level, something is fundamentally off. The lines aren’t wrong, the idea is. The chapter arrangement isn’t wrong, the premise is. It takes a lot of soul searching and heaps of rework to fix this. It’s like going back to the drawing board, erasing everything, and starting mostly from scratch.
- Impostor Syndrome: This happens at all stages of creative production. You feel like a hack, a fake, and everyone can see it (at least you FEEL that way). Successful authors talk about experiencing Impostor Syndrome all the time. You feel like you don’t deserve to create something because you don’t have enough talent or enough experience. You doubt your very status as a creator. This is hard to overcome, but we’ll get there in a few days.
- Overwhelming Fear: Lastly, you have crippling terror. “What if my book doesn’t sell?” “What if I can’t find an agent?” “What if my hard drive crashes and I lose everything?” “What if my guitar catches on fire?” “What if I actually DO succeed but it isn’t enough and I still feel like a failure?” This is anxiety at the deepest level. We’ll talk about this too.
You can see that the intensity ratchets up significantly between levels, especially 4 and 5. I want to go through all these, offer the doubts I’ve felt, and talk about strategies to combat them that I’ve used to move past the doubts. Yes, I’ve felt all five of these at various stages of the process over the last ten years and I expect to feel them all again and again. It isn’t avoiding the doubts that is the most important thing, it’s managing them when they come to keep yourself from curling in a ball and crying yourself to sleep. There is strength in creation and we’re going to talk about harnessing it.
May the tide carry you to safer shores.
BSG
Brian S. Gardner 