Pax on both houses: Virginia Woolf On Writing And Self-Doubt

Sunday, March 1, 2015

Virginia Woolf On Writing And Self-Doubt

Excerpt: "Bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt," Charles Bukowski lamented in an interview.

Virginia Woolf on Writing and Self-Doubt

"Bad writers tend to have the self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt," Charles Bukowski lamented in an interview. Self-doubt is a familiar state for all who put pieces of their inner lives into the outside world – that is, for all artists. "Determination allows for doubt and for humility – both of which are critical," Anna Deavere Smith counseled in her indispensable Letters to a Young Artist. And yet, integral as it may be to the creative experience by offering an antidote to the arrogance that produces most mediocre art, self-doubt isn't something we readily or heartily embrace. Instead, we run from it, we judge it, and we hedge against it using a range of coping mechanisms, many of which backfire into self-loathing. "Don’t mask self-doubt with contempt," Zadie Smith advised in her ten rules of writing.

But hardly anyone has captured this exasperating dance with self-doubt – which is part of the artist's universal and necessary dance with fear – better than Virginia Woolf, she of enduring wisdom on creativity and consciousness and the challenge of writing about the soul.

In Orlando: A Biography (public library) – her subversive 1928 novel, regarded as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature" – Woolf captures the anguishing self-doubt with which all artists tussle along the creative process, rendering in spectacular relief the particular granularity familiar to writers:

Anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how he wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy; in despair; had his good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw his book plain before him and it vanished; acted people's parts as he ate; mouthed them as he walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether he was the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.