On the Wings of Greats: Writing Away Self Doubt

“My doubts stand in a cirlce around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.” -Franz Kafka, Diaries: 1910–1923

When approaching langauge, Kafka describes a sense of doubt, particularly about meaning, followed by his trust in the imagination as revealing deeper truths.

In his diary, Kafka is honest and raw describing the process of writing as “a complete opening of body and soul.” Despite this beautiful description of how writing made him feel, Kafka requested all of his work burned after his death — but his friends, like Max Brod did not listen, and instead had them published (Gillard, John in Creative Writer’s Notebook). Sadly, only a small portion of Kafka's writing survives.

Do you have a person like this in your life, who encourages you to be vulnerable, sometimes even requires it, or forces you to stay true to yourself?

And what of today’s age of writing; how does it influence the meaning of language and our ability to trust our imagination?

At the heart of creativity is something special, but difficult to navigate: vulnerability, emotion. To writing, we bring a unique set of factors — an individual set of fears, pains, joys, failures, successes and perhaps most important of all —empathy — to consider the pain of another as our pain. That does not mean we have to give our entire selves away when we write. It means we inject vulnerability in pieces, or into sections, or some truth, or whatever it is we can handle at that time. Yet, not everything that influences our creative writing is on the surface, some things are much deeper, and we discover them as we write.

In Haruki Murakami's “Kafka on The Shore,” the character, who chooses to be renamed after the writer, begins his journey with this:

"The storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine."

In writing, we discover a part of ourselves that we were not even aware of. Our imagination allows us to go in different directions and explore without bounds. We let go. I relate to this feeling of a sandstorm — I am working on my first book and it still feels like I could get lost before I finish. Yet, some of that doubt propels me to work harder.

We can plug anything into AI and it will churn out topics, themes, even books! If the human mind worked the way a computer does — so full of logic and ease — it would push aside the millions of rabbit holes, self-doubts, emotions, unrelated ideas, and competing thoughts.

AI finds patterns, a very small subset of creative thinking; it builds on prior information. Eventually, if it starts to build off itself, it will lack creativity and the model can even collapse. It does not inject a true personal perspective, emotion, life experience, and perhaps most interestingly, a subconscious mind. We can seemingly try to program a model to add these things artificially, but we bypass the growth that comes from writing and rewriting.

What would writing be without the voice behind it? Would we be left with a hollow tree without roots?

We crave to be understood — to have meaning in our lives — and if you are a writer it is very likely that writing gives you those things. In order to deal with this circular pattern of excitment and resignation in failure — I began to read more, paying homage to those writers who came before, asking the same questions, having the same doubts, and confronting the challenges. Their advice challenges us to accept the doubts and work through them.

The creative mind needs space — and when we make that space too small we suffocate creative flow — a type of creative energy that occurs when we allow ourselves to fall into what we are doing completely. Writing opens a part of our mind that we are not in control of — while we can logically define the space, time and even amount of writing we set out to do — we can not plan what creative inspiration occurs. On the other hand, as Stephen King often warns, we can’t let the muse have all the control — writing must be consistent. King reminds us to show up. The muse may or may not cooperate. We may feel uninspired and lose our way.

Many great writers dedicated the first pages of their works to this unsaid force of inspiration. We can call on our muse — bring her to the table when she doesn’t show up — and give the muse the time she deserves.

To deal with this circular pattern of excitment at beginning and then resignation in failure — I began to read more and found that I could fly on the wings of writers before me. There were so many authors, in fact, who struggled and openly shared their stories. I think when we idolize the writers we love, it is easy to forget the obstacles they faced. We disregard their imperfect path to completing a work. Creativity is a messy, sometimes chaotic process and seeing that up close helps us make sense of our own creative lives.

I have struggled with the inner workings of writing — believing that these aspects were unique to my own experience. When I stopped writing, it was easy to see that I needed this form of expression like I needed food. The ugly beast I finally identified at the root of all of this was simple — self doubt. Yet, writing has been the tool to help me overcome it.

How many writers had to wait centuries before being discovered, how many had manuscripts rejected time and time again, and how many didn’t fall in with the conventions of their time, only to be rediscovered centuries later?

In the quest, Anne Lamott provides a solution. She reminds us that the entire purpose of writing has already been fulfilled the minute that we sit down to write. Maybe your writing is good, maybe it is bad, but this commitment to the act of writing, not only allows it to improve, but it makes you what you are — a writer. In “Bird by Bird,” she explains that a first draft is a place for freedom — a place to wander. She describes a time she edited a book three times at the request of an editor — it was painstaking, but every single time, she learned something and grew as a writer — it became her best novel.

The second we take the time to put words on paper, revise them again amd again, and finally let them go into the world, something magical happens. We are letting words be our guide, and allowing others into the lens of our creation. We pay homage to those writers who came before us asking the same questions, having the same doubts, and seeking artistic beauty. We write on the wings of writers — we trust in them to guide our craft. Their advice changes the way we write, and their work touches our soul. And here is the secret I learned: we never write alone. We write on the wings of greats.