I believe you have had the misfortune to meet my self-doubt demons. I wanted to dedicate today’s post to one of them; a tiresome little guy I like to call the What-If-I-Actually-Suck Demon.
He’s not one of my regulars, probably because I have a strong resistance to his wiles; I have been lucky enough to build up enough external validation from “high-stakes” critics (agents and editors, for example) that I have a solid pile of evidence against his case.
I’ll tell you when he does tend to show up, though. He shows up when I am unimpressed by somebody else’s work. Especially when that somebody approached me specifically and asked my opinion of said work, and I find it sloppy, or not well executed, or just plain bad.
You see, self-doubt demons are highly skilled at creating paradoxical vortexes of shame. On one side of the vortex is the fear that I’m a snob: who the hell am I to judge someone else’s work as being “not good enough”? On the other side is the fear that we’re both in the “riffraff section”–it takes one to know one, right?
Look, there’s a grain of truth here: not everyone is a “great” artist. Not every person who dabbles in a creative discipline is going to become a master at it. There is a certain measure of talent that’s required, and talent is not something you can choose or develop, it’s something you were born with. It’s all well and good for me to say, as I do in the Creative Resilience Manifesto, that “the only opinion that really matters is your own”; but what if your work does suck and you can’t see it?
On surface level, it’s a legitimate question.
But let’s look a little deeper.
Art Is Subjective
In the academic world, what they consider “high-quality” art or literature generally lives up to a certain set of “standards”. However, the thing about those “standards” is that they are subject to change. Once upon a time, if your piece didn’t resolve neatly into classical harmonies, it wasn’t music. If your poem didn’t rhyme or fit whatever meter was fashionable, it wasn’t poetry. These things aren’t objective; they change all the time.
So what does all “great” art, literature, and music have in common?
Can greatness be measured objectively?
A Matter of Taste
The more I’ve learned about literature, the more I’ve been able to put words to what I enjoy or don’t enjoy about a piece. For example, I probably won’t enjoy a story that doesn’t have a solid plot structure, good character development, crisp, believable dialogue, and the kind of writing that reads smoothly and engages the senses well. I also happen to prefer stories that convey a nuanced and complex message–preferably a hopeful one, but not Pollyannish. That’s my taste; it’s developed through my own encounters with literature, as a reader, a student, and a writer.
Some of the things I appreciate in literature are fairly “standard”. If you take a creative writing class, your teacher is likely to help you develop your skills to create pieces that have many of those characteristics. But that doesn’t make them objective requirements for great literature. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse has, like, no plot. Charles Dickens was paid per word, and you can tell from his pages and pages of descriptions that any sane writing coach in the 21st century would take a serious hatchet to. Heck, even J. K. Rowling, who was my heroine as a teenager, could definitely have done with a frank conversation about conciseness vis-a-vis the latter books of the Harry Potter series. (What editor let her keep that epilogue in book #7?! Seriously!!!)
So What Makes Art “Great”?
If greatness doesn’t have objective perimeters–what makes something great?
One thing, and one thing only: it resonates with people.
That is, people connect to it and find it meaningful.
The more people the piece resonates with, the more likely it is to be considered “great”.
This is very fickle and impossible to predict. Because even the same person might feel completely differently about a piece of art if he has a different background, or different information, or is influenced by fashion and the culture around him. That’s why artists, writers, and musicians are often grouped by era; what they were doing resonated with people who were influenced by the times. Bob Dylan would probably not have won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1905. Then again, if he had been raised in the late 19th century, the stuff he’d be producing would probably have been very different.
The Quality of Your Work Isn’t Static
If what you’re producing now is not the kind of work that resonates with a lot of people, that doesn’t mean that will never change.
Talent is only a small part of what it takes to make art that resonates. Hard work, experimentation, technique, and practice have a much bigger part in creating impressive art.
You’re on a journey. As long as you stay open and willing to learn and experiment, you will continue to improve, making your work resonate with more and more people. Take a class if you like; read about your craft. Never stop viewing, reading, or otherwise enjoying art in your field; you can learn a ton from the work of other people. I can’t promise you that you’ll excel and find hundreds of thousands of fans. That, as I’ve discussed in the past, has more to do with luck than anything else.
But your job isn’t to find hundreds of thousands of fans. Your job is three things:
- To remember that you are the highest authority where your work is concerned. It doesn’t actually matter what anyone else thinks of it. If you think your worth is worthy–it’s worthy. Period.
- To find your audience–even if it’s an audience of one. If your work resonates with someone, it may resonate with more. Find those people and use their support to inspire you and improve your craft. Don’t let it discourage you if your audience is small. What matters is that you are making someone’s life richer and more meaningful with your work.
- To keep growing, keep practicing, and keep “daring greatly”.
The Bottom Line:
“What if I actually suck?”is not a helpful question.
This shouldn’t surprise us; it’s a self-doubt-demon question. If anyone sucks at anything, it’s self-doubt demons at coming up with helpful questions!
Here are some better questions to replace it with:
- What am I trying to accomplish with my work?
- Is my work achieving that goal?
- How can I move toward that goal?
- Who is my work resonating with?
- Do I want it to resonate with more people?
- How can I make that happen?
Remember item #1 on the Creative Resilience Manifesto?
I create because creation is an act of love.
Not greatness. Not success. Not talent. Love.
So get out there and show us some love.
Reblogged this on Trish Hopkinson and commented:
Excellent advice from fellow blogger Daniella Levy on how to evaluate the quality of our own creative work and determine whether or not we’re meeting our personal goals.
Thanks so much for the reblog, Trish!
I think this question is a natural part of the editing process, but I phrase it: “Does this section suck?” So long as I edit, edit, edit until a section no longer sucks, then I don’t suck. So I’ve stopped asking myself this question. Instead, I honor my right to write dross some days, and I trust I will go back over them until they gleam. I can edit dross. I can’t edit a page left blank by anxiety. Great article. Best of luck with your demons. 🙂
Haha, thanks. I think there is a huge difference between, “Does my creation suck?” and “Do *I* suck?” But even so, I think it’s more constructive to ask questions like, “Is this working for me?” or “Do I love this?” and if I don’t love it – I edit until I do. I think it’s important to be kind to ourselves.
Yes, there is always a kinder way to put things than my highly-critical brain devises. I usually come to it with editing. 😉
Reblogged this on Pdlyons's Explorations.
thank you. great piece. good advice.
I’m glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for the reblog 🙂
Glad you enjoyed it!
Enjoyed reading this piece. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for writing this. The self-doubt comes in waves, which I’m used to. Let one wave crash over you and you get salty and seaweed-y for a bit, but then the ocean smooths out again into those peaceful sounds. The last couple of weeks, however, have felt more like a rip tide. Ugh. I can’t really stop writing, my head gets too full, and I don’t want to stop either. but that lack of confidence sometimes can be rough!!
Thanks for writing this. Really encouraging and comforting in a way. Sometimes its hard not to look at the numbers reading your work and you think it’s just because you suck. It’s okay though, like you said, writers have the opportunity to keep improving.
Absolutely.
I feel like mine “What if I suck?” demon pops up in exactly the opposite situation as yours. It pops up when I read other material reaching the same audience I want to attract and the writers are doing a much better job than me.
Like, it’s reaching the people and touching the people, and I’m just not hitting those marks.
And yeah, it’s a process, but at a certain point, you have to submit, and when looooots of time passes, and your manuscript is legitimately not resonating with people and it’s not appealing to those audiences, and you have applied yourself and it’s legit not happening, you just want to throw in the towel.
Oh, that’s when my I’ll-Never-Be-Able-to-Write-Like-This Demon shows up. (Ha, I’ll-Never-Be-Able-to-Write-Like-This was actually in my predictive text!) Happens to me a lot when I read a really good book and I’m just like, why do I even try, I’m never going to be great like this.
I’d like to ask you more about the situation you’re describing. What kind of an audience is it reaching and in what form? Are you getting feedback on it?
This is such a great piece–on the demonic level, and also on the what-does-big-success entail. (I’d love to hear your thoughts on whether the kind of luck you so wisely point to can be…influenced).
By the way, I love a hopeful, non-Pollyanna ending too. I think I strive to write one in every book–the fourteen unpublished ones, and the four published.
Thanks, Jenny. I didn’t elaborate much on luck here, but I think there are several levels of it. The first level is being lucky enough to have the will and skills to write the kind of thing that sells in our day and age–to have an interest in a genre and concept that is fashionable or at least marketable. Unfortunately I feel that this issue is one of the reasons I still don’t have an agent. My debut novel was hard to place partly because it sort of straddled genres, making it difficult to classify, and the fact that religion played a central role (and that the religion portrayed most positively was not Christianity) made it a hard sell to a mainstream audience. The manuscript I’m currently waiting to hear back on from 3 agents I thought might be even less likely to find a mainstream publisher because it’s a deadly combination of 1) short (under 60k) 2) political (though portrays a wide range of political perspectives, which is kind of the point) 3) set in Israel/Gaza and portrays Israelis, including *gasp* settlers–*and* Palestinians–positively. So basically there is no political faction in existence it won’t piss off to some degree. I like that about it and think that’s what makes it really good, but it also probably makes it a hard sell.
Can that be influenced? Well, you can decide that you want to invest your energies in writing the kind of stuff that sells. You can stay on top of market trends and try to write what’s trendy. Personally, I balk at this idea. I’ve always written for me, not for anyone else, and I don’t want to write anything that didn’t come from me. I want to stay true to myself, and that may come at the cost of never being the kind of writer who produces bestsellers. That’s my personal choice.
So that’s one level. The next level is getting discovered. Obviously, the harder you work at this the more likely you are to find an agent, but the odds are still stacked against you to an incredible degree, and in an industry so subjective, you just never know what could be influencing your success or lack thereof. The agent (or assistant, or intern) reading your MS may be influenced to react positively or negatively to it based on totally arbitrary things. Maybe she had a bad day or they were out of milk at the office the morning she gets to your query and she hates drinking her coffee black. Maybe he has a good friend who shares the name of your protagonist and this softens him while he’s reading your pages. It could be anything. I’ve heard stories of agents who turned down a query, then the author submitted again on a later round forgetting that they’d submitted before, and this time the agent offered rep. It’s so, so subjective, and you have to be lucky enough to come across an agent–and then an editor–who really “gets” your book. I don’t think that can be influenced beyond just continuing to plug away at it indefinitely until you finally find the right one. But there are only so many agents and editors in the industry who work with your genre, and at some point, you might run out…
The third level is reception–how the audience reacts to your work. You can influence how wide an audience you reach with skilled marketing, but how people react to your book is beyond your control. There are stories about authors whose book releases coincided with world events or sudden trends that negatively influenced sales. (I know someone who was getting a ton of attention from agents until Trump was elected, and then afterwards–crickets. I also know of an author whose book released on September 11th, 2001…) Or, just like with agents and editors, you can never really predict what subjective factors contribute to people’s responses. I know I definitely feel differently about books I read depending on my stage in life or particular mindset at the time.
…I think this comment is turning into a blog post. LOL
Definitely a blog post–love to read even more elaboration! I agree with you to a large extent…and I applaud you for tapping into your own area of interest/passion and sticking to it. I do truly believe that will earn you a niche one day–and frankly, can’t imagine a better time for “none of them are right, and none of them are demons either’ thinking.
I think at the get-an-agent (or editor) stage, the aspects you mention do have a lot to do with luck. But the factors continue long *after* those hurdles are mounted too. The get-good-support-from-your-publisher stage. The which-pubs-review stage. The does-it-win-an-award stage. Etc.
The one aspect where I disagree slightly is that with skilled marketing you can influence how wide an audience is reached. Increasingly there’s no such thing as skilled marketing–or at least no such reliable thing. I think that publishing is in a crisis period because there are no influencers–still less the author herself–who can draw in a large audience and reliably make a bestseller. Oprah’s original book club was perhaps the last such.
Now it’s a bit-by-bit-by-bit crawl to draw in readers and hope that eventually a tipping point is reached. And there luck comes in again!
Well, you’re definitely more of an authority on the matter of marketing than I am!
There’s something really frustrating about knowing how much of it is out of our hands… but something freeing, too. If it’s not your responsibility, it’s also not your fault. If you’re not succeeding, it’s not because you’re doing something wrong. I think one of my main points in this blog is that in order to be happy as a creative person, success can’t be our ultimate goal, because we just don’t have enough control over it. We have to have a different motive for doing what we’re doing. We need to create an almost self-contained system where the work we do serves as its own reward. That releases us from dependency on factors beyond our control. Hence the first line of the Creative Resilience Manifesto: I create because creation is an act of love. It’s not that we shouldn’t have other motives and goals, but to stay resilient, the main thing driving us to keep working needs to be the work itself. And I believe that when we orient ourselves that way, we will find our path, we will find our audience, and we will find satisfaction in our work. Sometimes–if we’re lucky–we’ll find success, too. (Though then there’s the whole question of what “success” means and how we should have the freedom and courage to define it for ourselves. But that’s another topic 😉 )
I love that perspective, Daniella. I definitely write for that reason. I write to transport myself to other lives and other worlds. To live adventures I–hopefully–never would otherwise. I write to entertain myself.
But since I’m lucky (or should that be unlucky, I wonder?) enough to write in a genre that IS very hot selling, I can’t release myself from the pressure I feel to succeed. To support my family. To let my kids’ futures unfold as they need them to. Maybe even to do some good in the world ultimately.
And you’re absolutely right–I control so little of that. It’s hard.