July's Bijoux List: On Self-Doubt (and realising mine is much worse than I'd thought)

This month's Bijoux List jumps from self-doubt to romantic comedies to sobbing on aeroplanes! What an eclectic month!

I’m back for another Bijoux List, my monthly accumulation of thoughts about things I’ve loved, pondered and experienced over the course of the past thirty-odd days. It’s a long one, so let’s dive straight in to July’s Best Moment.

1. July’s Best (and Worst) Moment

Over the years, I’ve heard so many people talk about Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way. Not just writers, but people from all walks of life. Mostly, they’ve raved about it, and talked about their morning pages as if they’re a transformative experience. Despite all the hype, I’d never read The Artist’s Way — until a couple of weeks ago.

Why have I never read it? Why have I started now? And how am I finding it?

To answer the first question, I guess it was partly because of the hype. Could anything really be that good? (except French cheese, which is worth every bit of hype!) I was also wary because I had the sense that it was all a bit of a cult.

I knew too that Julia Cameron talked about God regularly in the book. I went to Catholic schools and was made to go to church every Sunday, and my experience of those Catholic schools and churches was that most things were sinful, any form of pleasure was bad, women’s bodies were especially shameful, sex was almost unspeakable, and that there was a man hovering above me, ready to rain down hellfire and damnation if I so much as looked at the cover of Flowers in the Attic, let alone read it. So the idea of a book about creativity referencing God was a complete turnoff for me. (I absolutely understand that many people don’t see God this way. Perhaps I went to the wrong schools and the wrong churches, but my experiences mean I have difficulty with anything that talks about God as a positive force.)

Onto my second question — so why am I reading it now? I always like to do things that help me become a better writer. I’ve carried a niggling concern for at least the last year or two that perhaps writing a book every year could drain my creativity completely away – if I let it. I’d also just finished a second draft of The Secret Life of Marie-Madeleine that’s at least 20,000 words too long and I was really stuck for ways to reduce it, beyond going in and slicing multiple sentences out of every chapter.

I wanted to get a better sense of what the book needed, rather than just what might be cut. I want to make it the best story possible – while still adhering to a reasonable word count. And

Kerri Maher

, a friend of mine, had suggested to a group of us that we do The Artist’s Way together. I couldn’t join in because the timing didn’t work for me, but part of my brain said, if so many people talk about this book, why don’t you give it a try? At least read a chapter or two; you’ve got nothing to lose.

So, two weeks ago, we went down to our brand-new holiday house by the sea and I began. How am I finding it?

My Version of The Artist’s Way

First up, I’m doing some of the tools my own way. For example, the fabled “morning pages”. You see, the other thing that’s always made me not want to do The Artist’s Way is the sense that the morning pages feel like something designed for privileged people. A mum who has to get three kids out the door to school every morning has very little time to sit down quietly and write three pages.

Of course, Julia Cameron suggests getting up half an hour earlier, but I already get up at 6am and I’m the kind of person who needs eight hours sleep every night. My writing suffers if I don’t. Getting up earlier is not something I want to do – and if I don’t want to do something, I knew I wouldn’t. And I’d be failing from the outset.

So I removed that barrier. I decided that so long as I did those three morning pages first when I sat at my desk, before I did any other work, then that would be fine. Also, every time I read the word God in Julia Cameron’s book, I would change it to goddess or muse. Both are concepts I relate to. And, indeed, Julia Cameron acknowledges that you should just go ahead and substitute whatever works for us.

As well as morning pages, there are things like affirmations, which I’ve done before, and then there are a whole series of exercises to work through each week. I’m only up to the end of week two, so my impressions are early.

Discovery No. 1 – I’m Kind of Mean to My Writing Self

The first week I found the morning pages much more helpful than I expected. Initially, the idea of sitting down and writing out three pages of whatever was top of my mind seemed unlikely to prove useful. But I soon realised I have a lot of thoughts running around my head in the morning, and that setting them down on paper gives me more of a sense that I’ll get them all done. I guess I’ve always been someone who likes a to-do list, and perhaps the morning pages are an extension of that.

I’ve also used the morning pages to probe some of the things that have come up for me in the weekly exercises, which are actually the things I’m finding the most useful.

I’ve always understood that every writer carries self-doubt with them, and that the thing to do is to acknowledge it, but not to get caught up in the self-doubt. I’ve also always been aware of the havoc that self-doubt can wreak with a writer’s confidence and productivity – and I thought that being aware meant that I was doing a good job of managing my self-doubt.

I think I may have been fooling myself.

In doing the exercises in the book, I’ve realised that, actually, there are a couple of negative reviews of my books that have taken up residence in my heart like school bullies and that, over the course of my writing day, they regularly throw nasty words at me like particularly accurate spitballs. If you want to read those reviews, you can do so here and here, but, in summary, I write formulaic and gooey glamscapes with too many adjectives and too much romance.

Yes, I herewith confess to loving adjectives and romance. What a crime against fiction!

But it’s all very well to laugh at myself because, it turns out – the joke’s on me. Working through the exercises and, in particular the “blurts”, I became very aware of the things I regularly find myself thinking as I write.

That my writing is bad. That I should write less about love if I want to be taken seriously, that my characters definitely shouldn’t have sex if I ever I want to be taken seriously (except that they always seem to end up in a bed together eventually!), that my prose is too lush. That I’m undeserving of my success because I write so-called commercial fiction (which is another way of saying I write trash) and only people who write award-winning books are deserving of success.

What To Do About My Inner Bullies?

So yes, there’s a lot to unpack in all of that. Those are some fairly hefty self-doubts to carry around when you’re trying to pour your whole heart and soul into a book.