Blots of Words and the Stain of Self-Doubt

My dream is to become a novelist. It is also my dream of self-doubt and insufficient motivation.

I always have a clear beginning to a story I want to write. Every minute I can spare, my head is full of imaginary scenarios, dialogues, settings, and characters. When the framework for a story is in my head, my ideas are clear and exciting. But once I transcribe them into sentences onto a piece of paper, they become muddled beyond recognition. My ideas that seemed so wonderful to me at the point they were conceived in my head now seem elementary, vague, and stagnant. I become confused about where I am going with these ideas and how I can actually make them work to create an exciting, meaningful, and complex-enough storyline. Because of this confusion, I lose both the ability and the desire to keep my story moving on, only to leave the couple of pages that I have started unfinished and unedited.

This failure to finish a story and to love my ideas that are written in the story plunges me into self-doubt. I feel like a horrible writer with no potential for writing anything that one could publish, sell, or even use to move other people. I ask myself, why can’t I write out my ideas in an interesting and cohesive manner? Why do I muddle them up when I actually try to make a story out of them? Why does my writing sound so lackluster, so forced, and unorganized? These questions crush my self-esteem as a writer and make me lose the motivation to start that new story I have had in the back of my head. I am afraid, not of failure or not being able to finish the story that I have started, but of the doubt that such failure will give me about my skills as a writer.

The lack of motivation makes me question whether writing is truly my passion. If I really loved writing, wouldn’t I want to do nothing but write? But, there is another voice in my head that tells me that these worries are useless and cowardly, because they will not save me from the doubts that I have about myself. When the sharp point of doubt starts to strike, I need to remind myself that I am excited when I jot down that new idea, dialogue, or the character. I remind myself that my mind is the most calm yet bursting with wonderful emotions when I am writing. I know that I am going to doubt myself from time to time throughout my life, but all I can do is tell myself that despite the doubts, I am in love with the world when I write. And that should be reason enough for me to keep on writing.

The thing about dreams is that it makes us happy, but it can make us suffer through that happiness. And gladly, we accept it.