Friday Coffee

I'm posting on Thursday late afternoon, because I'm going away for a few days early tomorrow morning (so I won't be commenting over the next week, sorry). Do please fetch yourself a drink and snack of your choice, and sit down for a wee reading and writing session.

I think writers are alchemists. Here’s why. First off, the obvious stuff: we take the lead of our lives and use our imaginations, minds, emotions, aspirations, eyes and hands to turn it into the gold of carefully crafted stories. But there’s more to it than that. We have to turn lots of things into lots of other things in the process: blank pages/screens into pages/screens covered in words; rubbish first drafts into honed later drafts; vague ideas into clear specific ideas. But one of the hardest, strangest, least well understood conversions we have to make, sometimes daily, hourly, or even minute-by-minute, is the transformation of lack of confidence into confidence.

So I thought this might be a useful topic for a coffee morning. It was partly inspired by two of our published novelists. Rowan Coleman recently blogged about her feelings on the imminent publication of her seventh novel, and defined excitement, restlessness, fear and uncertainty. Clare Sudbery, whose second novel is soon to be published, commented on Rowan’s post, saying ‘I can’t work out whether to be dismayed or reassured that you are still saying ‘Yikes!’ about an impending publication when you have so many under your belt already.’ I bet lots of us have a fantasy that a time will come – when we have an agent; when we have a book deal; when we have a published novel; when we get asked to speak at a literary festival – a time when we will no longer lack confidence; when we will somehow have made it into that longed-for world where fear and uncertainty have no place.

But it is a fantasy, isn’t it? Yet there are things we can do to help ourselves when that inner voice starts its insidious mutterings about why we ever had the temerity to think we could even construct an interesting sentence, let alone a whole novel; how we’ll never be as good a writer as X or Y; that our writing skill is poor, worthless, broken. I have a few techniques to share. One is to visualise the owner of that voice as a nasty little black goblin, and me as a big powerful woman belting it to death with a big heavy cast iron frying pan (no, I don’t know why, but it works for me). Another is to use affirmations, to say out loud to myself ten times ‘I, Zinnia Cyclamen, deserve that more of the energy I put into my writing should return to me in the form of recognition.’ A third is to look through my Nice Letters File, where I keep letters, cards and emails where someone has sent me an unsolicited compliment or a personal thank-you. I really recommend this if you don’t do it yourself; it’s very good for the self-esteem. You can include evidence of achievements as well; mine has a couple of letters telling me of good exam results. And a fourth method is to flick through a how-to book, which often helps me when I feel stuck or blocked.

I find that belonging to the Novel Racers is another confidence booster. Although I should probably own up that I’m not, generally speaking, lacking in confidence. (In fact I recently scared Top Bloke by telling him that a new activity I’d taken up had increased my confidence. He looked at me, alarmed, and said ‘You mean you’re going to have more confidence?’) But, even so, sometimes writing seems to sap my confidence, and it’s all I can do to pull myself around and get going again. So I’ll be glad to hear of any tips other Racers can offer for ways to boost writing-related confidence.