Look, don’t get me wrong; like every other writer (or more generally, artist) when I look at the stuff I’ve done I can only see the flaws, the things I would change now. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate good editing and chances to revise. But I’ve always said that writing takes a kind of doublethink, where on the one hand you are painfully conscious of your weaknesses (or else you’ll never improve) but on the other you are supremely confident in your own abilities (or else you’d never create in the first place). I don’t think I have that much ego about my own stuff; there are better writers than me, and worse ones. But I do think that what I do is good.
I have this doublethink for sure, but I’ve got to find a way to get it balanced back out a bit towards the side of confidence. I haven’t exactly been shouting about my own paid work from the social-media rooftops — or posting much idle-thought miscellany in general — because I have this strange feeling that there’s got to be some flaws in it somewhere that I missed but don’t want to draw anyone else’s attention to. That this brainfreeze has extended to things I’ve stopped doing regularly — like “making jokes on Twitter” and “posting clips of songs I like on Tumblr” — is either a symptom of the way social media can stifle people who want to avoid inviting contentiousness/argument for its own sake, or evidence that I’ve got to stop worrying so damn much.
(Source: girlboymusic)
