For a minute there, I thought I knew what I was doing

Fluency vs. doubt

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

For a minute, I thought I knew what I was doing.

Then I thought, who the fuck am I? What on earth makes me think I know what I’m doing?

It’s unfortunate, but I’ve been through this cycle many, many times in my life. A little bit of fluency followed by a gut punch of self-doubt. Sometimes the self-doubt comes out of nowhere; sometimes it comes from my response to something in the real world. And for a very long time, I’ve believed in the self-doubt and given a big hairy eyeball to the sense of supposed fluency that made me stick my neck out a little.

I think this is probably something a lot of people struggle with. Especially creative people. (I’m a registered nurse as my side hustle, and I do not have this problem in that career. It’s so much easier—and arguably more important—to identify when I know what I’m doing and when I don’t as a nurse than it is as a writer.)

Art defies mastery. Unless you are part of an academic hierarchy, there are no tests, no certifications, no letters after your name or badges or sashes or hats or little pins that say you are now an expert at this writing thing. The greatest artists, the ones we (problematically) call “masters,” have surely had bouts of feeling inadequate to the task.

As a writer, the only sense of knowing, as in knowing-what-I’m-doing, comes in the moment, alone with my thoughts, putting words together on the page. There is only the close, intimate space between the mind, the spirit, and language—and how one operates in that space is everything.

It is only in the immediate act of writing—being in that close space with myself, my thoughts and feelings, and the language—that I can feel right in my art. The moment I step outside of it—when I close the laptop and get a snack and go about my other business—the best I can do is look back and think, well, I achieved a certain word count. Or I finished a draft. Or I wrote a scene that I think works.

The worst I can do when I am outside of that space—and this is what I do far too often—is look at whatever nascent product is forming there and judge the fuck out of it. It’s too this and not enough that. No one will care. And worst, there is some fundamental flaw in it that I am constitutionally unable to see and which will be the giant booby trap that embarrassingly and publicly unravels the whole thing. Sound dramatic? It is. Welcome to the inside of my brain. It has taken me literally weeks to write this piece because of my brain trying to guard me from this imagined terrible outcome. It’s paralyzing.

I’ll be honest; this year, I let the market get to my head. I looked at weak sales of my first book (and likely my second—a publisher doesn’t throw resources behind the follow up to a weak first outing), and I thought, this proves it. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. Who on earth should listen to me? I’m nobody. Etc. etc. I went down a long dark hole of believing that the market response to my work was proof positive of my lack of fluency. Certainly of my lack of authority.

There is empirical evidence to the contrary: I wrote two very good books. A serious agent and a serious editor believed in them enough to get them to publication and onto bookstore shelves. People did buy them, and many of those people loved them. I’ve done a lot of analytical, organized, intentional study about how the elements of novel-length writing work. I also have pretty well-developed emotional intelligence and a lot of life experience.

Finally I’ve come to a point where I look at all that self doubt and think, I am tired of this shit. So I am choosing to think differently. The default (dependence on external markers of validation) has been on for so long, it’s going to take some muscle to crank everything around to a custom setting. But I say this to myself and to you and to everyone—life is too fucking short not to own your own knowing, your own skill, your own wisdom.

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I’d love to hear how you experience “knowing what you’re doing.” What does fluency feel like to you? I’m so much more familiar with un-knowing and self-doubt, and I’d love to get more familiar with its opposite.