by Lisa Norman
The other day I walked into my doctor’s office, miserable. It was hot. Everything hurt. The waiting room felt small and stuffy, the chairs were hard, and I was counting the minutes until somebody called my name.
I was there for dry needling, a pain treatment for the autoimmune condition I live with. (Yes, a perfectly nice person sticks needles into me on purpose. And I pay her for it! We’ll come back to that.)
When I walked out afterward, I stopped in the parking lot.
It was a beautiful day. The sun was shining. A fresh breeze was coming in off the ocean, cool and clean. The kind of day I live for. Breathtaking.
Nothing about the weather had changed in that hour. What changed was me. The pain had backed off, and with it out of the way, I could see the beauty of the world.
I’ve been thinking about that parking lot, because what we notice tells us a lot about where we are emotionally.
The same thing applies to our characters.
What Our Characters Notice
When it comes to characters, we’ve talked about this often here at WITS, so I’ll keep it short. What a character notices tells the reader who that character is. It also tells the reader what emotional state the character is in right now.
One of the hardest characters I’ve ever written is Kevin, from my novel Sisterhood. Kevin has been through so much trauma that he behaves in ways that could easily be read as evil. He’s actually the hero of the story.
Writing him involved revealing his mental state through what he notices.
Kevin sees danger. He sees threats. And he sees potential.
When he looks at Dana, my main character, he sees her strengths without really understanding her weaknesses. When he looks at his brothers, he sees their potential for harm, because he knows exactly what he is capable of. Nothing they do feels neutral to him. He expects them to have dark, ulterior motives. And to be fair, they often do.
Kevin is a protector. He would do anything to keep Dana safe. But he can’t see that his brothers might be protective, too.
What he knows about himself decides what he’s able to notice in other people.
What Kevin notices shows us details about his inner life, just like what I noticed outside that doctor’s office revealed how I was feeling better than a pain scale ever could.
Kevin doesn’t always see the world as it is any more than I saw the beauty of the day while I was in pain.
How Self-Doubt Changes What We Notice
I work with authors at every stage of their careers, and lately I keep hearing the same thing from the newer ones, the authors who haven’t hit their stride yet.
They question their skill, their abilities, their work ethic. They judge their future success harshly and critique everything from their own headshot to their writing skill.
When they look at other writers on social media, or look at the platform and work an established author has created, they notice all of the good things while missing the weak points. They notice the polish, like the author who seems to have her whole business together, website and release schedule and all. But maybe they don’t notice that this author is a year behind on a deadline. They don’t know that the sales on that last book, the one that has such great advertising, have been weak.
When they look at themselves, they see every flaw and every weakness, but often miss their strengths entirely. And as authors, it is often hard to distinguish our humanity from our craft. A critique of craft can become a personal attack.
When they look at others, they often see only strengths and miss the struggles. That’s a part of our social media polished world, and it is all too easy to fall into. We compare ourselves at our worst to others at their best.
I recognize this because I do it, too. Listen to me talk about my own writing sometime. My books are “adequate.” “Okay.” “Passable.” Meanwhile, other people are having amazing success.
(I can hear myself doing it as I type this. Okay, so maybe I heard myself because I was using dictation… but whatever.)
“They’re just better than I am” is a comfortable sentence. It ends the conversation. It blends a personal critique with a skill judgment. But when I actually look at the gap between my work and someone else’s, I know there’s more to it. It’s time spent writing, and time spent focused, and I often let my writing self down by not giving her focused time to write.
“They’re better” is noticing me, and ignoring what I’d need to do to become better.
Critiquing myself instead of my work habits makes the analysis more brutal and less actionable. It is also frequently cruelly unfair. I’ve heard writers put themselves and their work down because they’ve taken time off to be caregivers or they’ve had to step away to deal with serious health issues. They’re noticing the lack of time rather than the gift of themselves that they gave to a person they were caring for, or the courage it took to battle a health issue.
We need to see the strengths and weaknesses in ourselves and in others, and we need to make an effort to separate reality from social media hype.
What if instead of just assuming my lack of focused time writing is a personal flaw, I instead notice that successful authors spend more time in the chair? What if I gave myself some grace for the life events that distract, and some credit for using the time I have as wisely as possible? That’s something I can act on, and something that will encourage me to be a better writer tomorrow. “They’re better” isn’t helpful.
Which brings me back to the needles.
A nice person poked holes in me, and I walked out feeling better. Poking holes in a story makes it better, too. Noticing what we need to make our writing better and acting on it improves our craft. Beating ourselves up just leaves the problems in place. The needles that we notice belong in the draft, not in the writer.
Self-Doubt in a Room Full of Bestsellers
Years ago, I went to a retreat and ended up in a class with five other authors. Every one of them had already made the New York Times or USA Today bestseller list.
And then there was me.
I wasn’t new to this. I’d been writing for years. I have a degree. I had studied the material for that class, probably more than anyone else in the room. None of that mattered to the voice in my head. I wanted to hide. I seriously considered sitting quietly and letting the real authors talk.
I mean, had I been invited to be the maid? Certainly I wasn’t there to sit next to these people and participate, right?
When I offered to go and help get lunch ready, the teacher insisted I take part.
So I did, and I had a great time. Once I was sitting at the table with them, instead of watching from what felt like across the room, I started noticing different things.
They were fighting with their technology. They were trying new tools and scrambling to keep up, exactly like every author I work with. They were trying to decide where to put their effort and which series to work on next. They debated words. They struggled with plot. They had characters misbehaving and wanting to go off the rails, the same as anybody does.
By the end of the class, I didn’t feel that far out of my league. I definitely wished I’d spent more time writing! But the distance I’d felt walking in was gone.
From across the room, they had looked polished. Up close, they were wrestling with the same draft problems as everybody else.
Successful Authors Still Struggle
That struggle doesn’t magically go away when somebody becomes successful. They have to face it again with every new series and every new book. Each one gets approached fresh.
I’ve watched New York Times bestselling authors melt down. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to get this book together. I don’t know if I’ll get it done on time. I don’t know. I don’t know.”
And then I hear newer authors saying nearly the same words, convinced the professionals never feel this way.
They do.
So when you hold your messy draft up against someone else’s finished, polished career, you’re looking at your own work with a magnifying glass while seeing theirs from a distance. Of course your work looks worse by comparison. You’re noticing the flaws in your work, and you aren’t seeing the struggle they’ve gone through. You’re noticing different things, looking at things without perspective.
What Experience Gives You That Self-Doubt Can’t Take Away
If there’s a difference between the bestsellers and the newer authors I work with, I think it’s this: the experienced ones seem a little more confident that they’ll pull it together. They get through the “I don’t know” faster.
That confidence comes from a track record. They’ve finished a book before, and then another one, so they have evidence they can do it again. Oh, they still have angst, but it is less paralyzing.
You build that faith in yourself the same way they did. One finished draft at a time.
And remember Kevin? He couldn’t see his brothers’ protectiveness because of what he believed about himself. Self-doubt does the same thing to writers. We look at other writers through what we believe about ourselves, and we miss that they’re in the same struggle we are.
Final Thoughts
The day outside my doctor’s office was beautiful the whole time. I just couldn’t see it until the pain backed off.
If your writing life hurts right now, your world may have shrunk down to the hard parts. That’s what pain does. It isn’t a verdict on you or your work.
You don’t have to have your act together to be a real writer.
When the hurt eases, even a little, look up. Notice what’s alive on your pages. And if you find yourself making judgments about yourself instead of the work, refocus on what you can improve. Don’t attack yourself and feed self-doubt.
What are you noticing today? Is there a focus shift that will help conquer a challenge in your writing world? And have you ever sat in a room certain that everyone else had it figured out? What did you notice once you looked closer? Please share in the comments!
About Lisa:
Lisa Norman (writing as Deleyna Marr) is a writer, a teacher, and by her own cheerful confession a control freak about her words. She wrote a book about working with AI as a creative partner, Reflections from the Mirror, which you can read for free on her Substack or purchase wherever you like to buy your books. She also teaches a class, Creative Collaboration with AI.
And if you're feeling like you need a little joy in your life, check out her latest book, The Work of Joy, or spend December with her in It's a Wonderful Writer's Life, the class that book grew from. Find her at deleyna.com or her school: NoStressWriting.com.
Featured image purchased from depositphotos.com.
