Writing Insecurities

I know I'm not working very hard on my writing right now (and by 'not working very hard', I mean 'not at all'), which I am reminded of whenever someone asks me how my novel is going. At first, I feel intensely guilty because I'm not giving my work the attention it deserves. Then, I feel like a fraud because pretty much everyone in my life is aware of the fact that I aspire to be a writer, but I haven't written any fiction since November. Finally, I remind myself that it took my favorite author, Patrick Rothfuss, over a decade to finish his first book. Here's what he says about it:

I wish I could go back in time and talk to my poor, lonely, confused teenage self and say, “Pat, things are not going to go smoothly for you over the next couple years. You will make terrible mistakes. You will spend a decade getting your college degree and writing a unmarketable behemoth of a fantasy novel. Most people, even the ones that love and support you, will think that this is a pretty stupid thing to do, and they will be right in thinking that.”

Then I would lean forward and say, “But if you keep writing, you will finish that book. And if you keep revising it, a publisher will buy it. They will pay you money for the story that came out of your head. And once that book is in print, there are people who will love your book. They will love it beyond all reason and expectation. They will love your book to such a degree that beautiful young women will strip naked and adorn their bodies with the image of your book, and then they will send you a picture of it!”

The original post is here, if you'd like more context for why naked women are adorning their bodies with the image of his book. I enjoy reading his everyday thoughts on the blog because even though his prose is so incredibly well wrought that I despair of ever crafting sentences as beautifully written as his, he's so down-to-earth and willing to share his insecurities with his readers.

Knowing that he struggled for years to write his novel provides me with some valuable perspective. He had a life, and a serious girlfriend, and even a baby for the last couple of years; so of course writing his novel took a long time. Even though he made it his full-time job, the second novel took him four years to complete. Keeping this in mind, it helps me beat myself up less over the fact that I'm not working as hard on my novel as I could be. I know what it will take to be deadly serious about my writing, and I don't know that I'm ready to make those sacrifices yet. Having a full-time job means that 40 hours of my life every week are already spoken for, and I like devoting much of my free time to friends right now. I've spent so much of my life holed up by myself, I'm not ready to go back to that yet.

Most importantly, I know that I can make the time. Every year, I take a month to set aside an average of two hours a day for my writing, and it completely works for me and gets my creativity rolling, though it isn't always easy to churn out the 2000 word quota I set for myself every day. That time exists there if I'm determined to pull it out of the ether, so knowing that it sits at the edges of my life is comforting. I am perfectly capable of doing it, so it isn't a question of ability.

Perhaps, that's the thing I worry about the most--am I truly capable of producing a worthwhile work of fiction? Maybe that's what stops me much of the time; I don't feel like I've found the story that I want to tell. However, I'm not going to find it if I don't go looking for it...