Lack of progress due to low confidence.

[Aosto]

I think the title says it all. I have a serious lack of confidence in my work. This is hindering my progress. I am only at 2600 words in my one and only WIP. I have been at this for close to a month. There are times I write close to 2k words and then promptly delete the entire entry for fear that it reads horribly.
This has always been my problem. I want to be good at what I do, but I feel what i'm doing is horrid. I have received some positive feedback on my story. But the negative vastly outweighs the positive.
How do my fellow scribes push through this 'slump' and just write? I want to get the story on paper, but my doubt is preventing this.

 

[BWFoster78]

Aosto,

I ran into a similar problem. I got to a point in my WIP and didn't continue for several months.

Though I hate the loss of time, looking back I realize that my skill wasn't at the level it needed to be to write the work in the manner it deserved. By studying books about writing, having my work critiqued, and reading forums like this one, I was able to improve my writing and continue. I finished my first draft (120k words) a while back and am now almost 2/3 of the way through the 2nd draft.

There are two schools of thought on how you should proceed.

1. Push through. Finish your piece no matter how bad you think it is. The very fact that you're writing will help improve your work.

2. Continue to edit, get comments, reedit, get comments, rededit, get... You get the point, until you feel your writing is good enough.

Which is best for you, or whether it's some combination of both, is a highly personal decision.

 

[T.Allen.Smith]

I want to be good at what I do, but I feel what i'm doing is horrid.

This might sound strange but it will be helpful if you get comfortable with the idea that it's going to be bad the first time through. As you learn, just by writing, your going to improve. Even renowned writers look back on their early works with an understanding of how bad they were. There's no real difference for you. It's just part of the process. You can learn a lot from courses, books, & other writers but when it comes down to it, writing is an art that only has one true route to improvement, the act of writing itself.

Even with more seasoned writers, the first drafts are usually not that good and need a lot of editing & revision. In most cases, it's revision that makes a work good. In other words, don't be to concerned with the quality of a first draft. Accept that it will be bad.

My advice is to set yourself a word count goal and aim to hit that number every day, regardless of your doubts, regardless of your confidence level, regardless of your level of inspiration. If you want to be good, I believe this is essential. When I became serious about writing, I learned that keeping track of my daily production (on a spreadsheet) aided my efforts because I held myself accountable. Now, writing every day is a habit. It feels strange and uncomfortable if I don't. That's what you want. Create the habit.

 

[Penpilot]

Here's my personal experience. There are days when I think what I write is gold and others where I think what I write is crap. On average it's somewhere in the middle. Sometimes I find that my gold is actually crap, and that my crap is actually gold. So, IMHO never throw away crap. Push it to the side until you can get distance from it and look at it objectively. The time required for this varies from person to person.

As for how to how to make progress. It sounds like you're striving for perfection on the first draft. Unless you're a absolute genius, I don't think that's going to happen. From my personal experience, trying for perfection on the first draft actually wastes time. I used to spend hours and hours perfecting a paragraph, a sentence, a scene, on the first draft only to realize later that I didn't need it. So all that time perfecting was wasted.

This is how I look at drafts. The first draft is a sketch. Everything is roughed in. In the following drafts, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, the sketch gets filled in adjusted and torn erased and redrawn until I'm satisfied with the end result. That first draft is allow to be ugly. For me it's about getting down the ideas about what I want to say and where I want things to be first before I find the final presentation of them.

To compare it to building a house, the first draft is setting up the foundation and frame. From there you can play around with the layout of internal walls and where the plumbing and electrics will go. The final draft is choosing paint, curtains, and furniture. To me it doesn't make sense in trying to complete one room right down to the furniture when the rest of the house hasn't even been framed yet. That's the way I look at it.

I'm sure there are others who like the one room at a time approach, but you have to figure out which makes most sense for you and the way you work. And since your current approach doesn't seem to be working for you, why not try a different one?

 

[Butterfly]

I sort of take the view that there are no good or bad writers, just experienced and inexperienced. To get the experience you need to practice, practice, practice... and write, write, write. Right?

But in being a writer you will always be learning something new, other ways of doing things, even when you think you have learned all there is to learn you will find that there is still so much to learn.

You can try and you might fail, but if you don't try you will definitely fail.

Push on, get the ideas down first - sometimes in paragraphs, sentences, or just a list of wordy things to include - because ideas are fickle things easily forgotten and wanting to change at any moment... then build around them and see where they lead you.

Oh, and don't delete anything... save in a file hidden on your computer somewhere because you never know what might spring out at you in the future when you have gained your experience.

 

[Chilari]

For about a year, starting in May last year, I had a similar problem. I'd just broken free of a story that was not good for me; I was too deep in it, and was constantly in conflict over how I wanted to write it, between what I felt made a better story and that which I felt was more appealing to me personally and potentially to an audience. Basically between tragic ending or happy romantic ending. After I stopped working on that and realised the harm it was doing me, the distraction is had caused from my studies and other aspects of my life, my writing confidence took a tumble. Soon after that I finished my course and immediately became one of the millions of unemployed people in the UK, giving another knock to my confidence. Come the start of this year I couldn't have written a line of fiction I was happy with if I spend a whole week trying non-stop.

It has taken a while to build up my confidence. It has taken a few false starts in writing too - three serious attempts including worldbuilding and outline, none of which got further than 3000 words, a few other silly little things, and a few fanfics including one rehash of an old one I'd not worked on for about a year. Getting a job helped, certainly. Writing articles about what I do know (and in so doing, actually doing something with my degrees!) But it was also the support here, the myriad threads about punctuation or approach to writing or creating fantasy races or whathaveyou. It was the Blood Pact and knowing others were struggling too, I wasn't alone.

But the thing that got me past the 3000 word mark, which has now taken me over 10,000 words (as of just now!) is a decision that it does not matter. It's just a story. It will probably never get published. It certainly won't as a first draft. So it's okay to just write and not agonise over whether I'm good enough, it's okay to churn out a boring scene set entirely in a silent library. Because nobody else is going to read it. If ever it gets to the stage where people are reading it, I'll have edited by then and fixed the worst and most glaring problems.

So having previously been convinced I can't produce anything of value without detailed outlining, I now realise that's not for me. I've got a vague idea of where the story is going. Don't get me wrong, I didn't jump in with no planning at all. I had ideas and I wrote them down and collected them into one big document of ideas, most of it working through ideas I have already had and adjusting them to be more logical. It's not a plan, not an outline. But it does, in a meandering way, set out the basic plot, the key characters, and one or two little bits of worldbuilding. And now I'm writing, and i'm not even referring to that meandering document, I'm going on memory and making decisions as I go along. I'm recording characters as I create them. And so far, it's working.

So maybe the answer for you is, like me, to try a different approach to writing. Something you've not tried before. If you're normally a pantser, try planning; if you usually outline in great detail, have a go at just going with it. If you normally edit as you go along, ban the backspace. But most importantly, realise that you don't have to create perfection. You just have to keep moving forward.

 

[Anders Ämting]

Basically, the only real way to become good at writing is to first write a ton of bad stuff. Nobody ever masters an entire artform right away. It takes practise.

Aosto, the best thing you can do now is relax. This is a risky stage, where most people give up. Worst case scenario, you become trapped in a mindset where nothing you write is as good as what you want to write, forever, because you just keep finding things you aren't happy with. Like a kind of literary anorexia, if you will. Seriously, I have seen it happen. Lots of promising authors are destroyed by their own perfectionism.

Don't misunderstand, improvement is something good that you are always going to strive foor. But that is in the future. Learn to look at your writing right now and say: "I did my best, so this will have to do for now. It's good enough." Be as objective as possible. Convince yourself that just because something could be done better, that doesn't necessarily mean it is bad.

Really, this is why I'm glad I started early - my early stuff was terrible, but as a kid I just didn't have the perspective to see just how bad my writing was. At that stage, it's important to be overconfident and a bit delusional, or you won't last.

 

[Steerpike]

A couple of things to remember:

1. Negative feedback often outweighs the positive, because the negative feedback is the only thing that really helps you get better. The positive is good and can reinforce that you're doing something right, but the things that are done right are already being handled well, so many reviewers will focus on the problems; and

2. Writers tend to be their own worse critics, and your fears may reflect an overly critical view of your own work.

You could always focus on something short and shop it around. Placing it somewhere will be a confidence boost.

 

[FatCat]

I've been having the same problems with my WIP. So, I embarked on Phil's 30 day soul-crushing challenge! I'm gonna write til I have no more ideas left, then write some more. Damn if it's good or not, I'm just pouring out walls of text to get over it haha. Figure somewhere along the line I might find my voice. Just keep writing, who cares if it's any good. I think writing may be like learning guitar on a longer timescale, you have to callous your fingers before you can even start to play, and even then it will still sound terrible. Practice, practice, practice.

 

[Penpilot]

@FatCat

Here's a little something my college writing teacher said. He said he wanted us to write a lot because he wanted us to empty ourselves. I never really got what he meant until much later. The act of continually writing empties us of of our pent up expectation, our accumulated ideas that are just so precious. In doing that it unchains us from trying to make our writing what we think it should be and just let it be what it is.

 

[Aosto]

Thank you all for the words of wisdom. I will try to just sit down and write. I'm also going to try and work on some short stories.

 

[gavintonks]

Deletion is never good, I just rewrite but have all my original documents archived and as I update so I archive. How can you possibly learn if you have deleted what you have written?

Confidence is inside of you and it is a personal choice. Plus good is process of trying and trying and trying again, so you defeat the process and have nothing to how for your hard work to date - do not do it

 

[Butterfly]

I'm also going to try and work on some short stories.

Yes... Short stories are a good idea. Quicker to write, quicker seeing the progress of a full story arc that can take a few days or a few weeks to write. You can use them to focus on one aspect of writing be it POV, Characterisation, fight scenes. You could make a list and work through it.

When I started writing, each chapter was more like a short story than a chapter itself. Perhaps thinking about a chapter being a short story might help you out.

 

[Aosto]

Deletion is never good, I just rewrite but have all my original documents archived and as I update so I archive. How can you possibly learn if you have deleted what you have written?

I write in Google Docs. It archives all work in the living document of my WIP. If I wanted to go back and view a previous entry or see what I have deleted I can do so with ease. I have had to do so on several occasions.

Yes... Short stories are a good idea. Quicker to write, quicker seeing the progress of a full story arc that can take a few days or a few weeks to write. You can use them to focus on one aspect of writing be it POV, Characterisation, fight scenes. You could make a list and work through it.

I can see the benefit of this. I need to learn how to write certain scenes. If any of you have viewed anything I posted in the showcase you can clearly see I lack in certain areas.

Thank you all again.