Self-doubt Armageddon

Don’t you just hate those days when self-doubt creeps in (or even worse, takes control) and ruins the fun of what you’ve written so far? I don’t mean during the revision and rewriting stages, where we take apart everything (plot, characters, POV etc) but long after that, when you’re supposed to be doing minor edits to the prose, or working with sentence lengths, or punctuation. It’s so annoying when you start questioning yourself on matters you’ve already covered and made sure you perfected, like, “Did it really take them that long to do this thing in that scene?” (Dah, yes! You were revising that scene for over two months, hello? You rewrote it three times already).

From Back to the Future
From Back to the Future

Then something else you corrected and improved two months earlier suddenly feels off, then a third thing, and a fourth after that. Things you knew for a fact up to a second prior to Self-Doubt Armageddon came knocking, that these things must not change and that’s how they have to be. Next thing you know you question your skill, your bright idea that you should write, which leads to “who’s going to read that pile of $*1t you’ve put on the screen,” and “my, God, this sucks,” and oh this and oh that… Annoying, isn’t it? I almost deleted everything I was working on yesterday. Almost.

Bruce Campbell from Evil Dead 2
Bruce Campbell from Evil Dead 2