When self-doubt strikes...

So I have been terribly busy lately working on Wolf Soul, the first volume of The Howl of the Wolf trilogy. It was finished more than a decade ago, believe it or not... Just last week I finished an amazing online course recommended by a friend and co-worker which greatly helped me recover my writing spark and, above all, the courage I longed for to carry on working on making a childhood dream come true: being an author and publishing my first book.

I am honest. I am not secretly hoping to become neither the next Pulitzer Prize nor the Nobel Prize for Literature. My genre is not even one that qualifies. I love writing and I am a firm believer that when one makes art from their heart (I wonder why these two words rhyme) and from their truth, it’s impossible to go wrong. It doesn’t matter – or it shouldn’t matter – whether people will like the final product or not. Yet, the more I revise my book the more I feel self-doubt lurk somewhere from the depths of my scattered mind. Just an fyi: I have revised the Portuguese version twice, translated it into English and am now revising it too. I am still finding inconsistencies... I am on the third revision and proofreading process and STILL finding mistakes and senseless things. Geez... Earlier today I found myself thinking if the book will ever be as I would like it to be. I read whole paragraphs and wonder if I chose the right words. Sometimes I think I’m not far-fetched enough. Other times I think it doesn’t sound naturally English. Gosh, I’m just writing a load of crap, who will want to read this? I take a deep breath. I delete and try again. I don’t like it. Let me go make coffee and try again. Delete. Write again. No, it’s not ok. Write again. Ok, this time it’s not so bad but I feel I can do better. OMG! In the meantime, my coffee got cold. My full time job got in the way as well. And I still had to find time to contact someone to come fix my washing machine one of these days. The joy...

I am sure that I am still going to revise this a few times before sending the final version for a third party reviser who happens to be the same person who recommended the online course to me. “Stop freaking out, lousiness is subjective.” he told me earlier today. I’ve given this sentence a thorough thought. It is indeed true. Even the greatest authors of all time could not please all. If I am not mistaken, Franz Kafka wasn’t even published while still alive. The Brontë sisters had to sign their novels with masculine pseudonyms because in their days women writers weren’t given any credit. A certain lady who created an amazing world of wizards was rejected countless times by publishers before one went ahead and published the first book. So what can I, a common mortal, do?

I can see myself shaking my head with the published book in my hands, thinking “You could have done better.” I guess we all feel this way about our art and our production. It’s actually good as it means we have the capacity to self-assess and criticise. However, and this is something I learned from this amazing course, perfect and done don’t really like each other. As Salvador Dali (my favourite painter) used to say: “Have no fear of perfection. You’ll never reach it”. Indeed, if you want to get something done, you better stop being a perfectionist. Otherwise you’ll never get anything out. Why? Because, perfection doesn’t exist. Or shall I say that we might never get to a state when we are 100% happy about our work.

Surely, nobody wants to write crap. But that’s where my friend’s sentence makes all the sense: lousiness is subjective. I might find a book or song or poem absolutely amazing but you think it’s rubbish. It happens. All the time, actually.

I am not saying that what I’m writing is not crap. It probably is. The point I am making is that we cannot let self-doubt and fear take over to the extent that we will not dare do what we love doing. As much as other people’s opinions are important, you cannot let them matter and you cannot let them affect your work. An opinion is an opinion and there are billions of opinions in the world. Just grab the pen, pencil, brush, keyboard, whatever, and do what sets your soul on fire. People will like it or not, that’s inevitable and you shouldn’t do your thing keeping anyone else but yourself in mind. As I said above, as long as you are doing something you resonate with, that comes from your truth, you definitely cannot go wrong.

So yes, I am going ahead with this, crap or not. I have even made the front and back covers myself and I think they aren’t too bad. I might regret doing this or I might wonder why I didn’t do it earlier. At this stage it doesn’t matter. I feel I owe it to myself and even to my poor characters who have been in my laptop for longer than a decade. I swear to you that sometimes I hear them ask me “When are you going to give us life?”

Stay tuned and beware! The werewolves are coming.