Richard Schiver

Tag: creative-writing

  • Overcoming Self-Doubt in Writing

    Overcoming Self-Doubt in Writing

    Anyone who is seriously perusing a career as a writer is familiar with the ups and downs that is the writer’s life. Some days you’re riding the top of that emotional wave as the words just flow from your fingers. Hanging ten from that proverbial surfboard of creation as the ocean of ideas washing through your mind batters itself against white beach of the blank page leaving in its wake the basis of what will become a powerful story.

    For every peak in the creative process, where it seems nothing can stand in your way, behind or beyond lies a shadowy valley of self doubt. When that creative wave dashes you against the unyielding stone of cold reality, you tumble from that peak to land in the valley of the shadow of death for the creative process.

    Suddenly the words that had flowed so freely dry up and one is left staring at the blank page as blood begins to form upon their forehead. Who wants to read anything I write? Why do I waste my time doing this? Who really cares anymore?

    Self doubt has silenced the muse. It has thrown a monkey wrench into the machinery of creation, clogging the gears, and stopping them dead in their tracks. Everyone who dares to believe they can create something another person wants to read faces these moments from time to time.

    The greats have carried on their own personal battles with self doubt. Struggling in the years of anonymity before they became an overnight success. Stephen King threw away the original manuscript for Carrie believing no one would want to read it. His wife rescued it from the trash and convinced him to carry on. Great writers from the past were known to agonize over the placement of every word, never really believing that what they were doing would ever be widely accepted.

    How many unknown greats have given up entirely, trashing their greatest works, and turning their backs on their dreams to accept second best? How many Lovecraft’s, Shelly’s, or Stokers have given up even before they started?

    More than we will ever know. One thing we’ve all learned when embarking upon our writing career is that we are our own worst critic. In my opinion what happens when we turn our mind to writing is that we begin to read as writers. We forget how to read as readers. We dissect every story, searching for clues to how the writer put the tale together. In doing so we forget the one thing that drew us to reading in the first place, the excitement of discovering a brand new world living between the covers of a book.

    Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
    – E. L. Doctorow

    If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn’t matter a damn how you write.
    – Somerset Maugham

    Any man who keeps working is not a failure. He may not be a great writer, but if he applies the old-fashioned virtues of hard, constant labor, he’ll eventually make some kind of career for himself as writer.
    – Ray Bradbury

  • How Music and Writing Connect: Finding Your Flow

    I’m running a little behind right now. Installed a new entry door on my house last week and have been paying for it ever since. My sciatica is kicking my butt and the heating pad has become my best friend. Hopefully soon it will loosen up and I can get back to our normally scheduled programming. My apologies all around.

    I recently found a clip on You Tube taken from the concert film, The Song Remains the Same, a movie released in 1976 that featured the group Led Zeppelin. Filmed during three nights of concerts at Madison Square Garden.

    The clip features the song Stairway to Heaven which has become a classic since it’s release in the early seventies. I grew up listening to groups like Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Boston, and The Eagles just to name a few. But this was the first time I even saw the guitar solo by Jimmy Paige halfway through the song, and I was blown away.

    In the close up you’ll notice that Jimmy’s eyes are closed as he’s playing. It’s as if he has transcended the mechanical melding of guitar and man, the song no longer coming from the musical score in his head. It is no longer the act of metal strings being strummed while fingers move to the appropriate fret. This goes much deeper than that. In a sense he has become the song itself and what we hear comes from the depths of his soul. Jimmy has entered the zone. If you were to ask him what he was thinking about while he was playing, I’m willing to bet he wouldn’t be entirely sure himself.

    Writers do the same thing when they create. During the initial phase of a story’s creation, after the spark that inspired it. To write that first draft the writer finds it necessary to venture into the zone where all things become possible. In the zone there is no grammar, no punctuation, at least not consciously at first. That will come later, during the many rewrites to polish the story to a hard brilliance. No, during that first stage, the very first time a word intrudes upon the unblemished page, the writer infused with the fever of creation slips into a state of self-hypnosis.

    For some the ability to slip into the zone becomes second nature. As soon as they sit down at their work they enter that altered state. For others it is a struggle to find that quiet room in the mind where all things become possible. Here time has no meaning. The seconds, minutes, and even hours pass unnoticed as the writer becomes wholly focused on that imaginary place they have created in their mind. Where the words flow like the waters of a swift moving river that passes through their consciousness. Dark, deep, and muddied by the swirling emotions that whisper across the page.

    It is only then that the writer is at peace.