Battling Doubt

How to Push Beyond Your Final Barriers and Finish Your Book

John Vorhaus

Author’s note: While working on this piece, I had a dream that I’d been assigned to write a book about snakes. I wonder if there’s any connection.

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“Writing a book,” said Winston Churchill, “is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”

We’ll be skipping over the fun parts here—writing as toy, amusement, and mistress—and going right to the master and tyrant parts. These two are the last steps a writer faces before the real fun of killing the monster and flinging it to the public. Since these final steps are so fraught with doubt, we’ll look at some specific strategies you can use to know when, how, and whether your beast is ready thus to be slain and slung.

And we’re going to start, strangely enough, with a quick review of how to make a bed.

SMOOTH THE RIGHT WRINKLES

You know how to make a bed, right? You throw a sheet on the mattress in some random fashion, grab it by the corners, and then throw it again in some slightly less random fashion. You do this two or three times until the sheet is relatively in the right place, and then you move on to local fixes: tucking it in, pulling it taut, and smoothing the wrinkles away. That’s where we are right now, in the “smoothing out the wrinkles” phase. The manuscript is pretty much done. The tens and hundreds of thousands of words are on the page. The story basically works. The thing is a thing, by and large. All that’s left are those last few wrinkles. But why are they so stubborn? Why is it so hard to get to closure? Because we’re up against a tough question: How done is done? Here are a couple of strategies to answer that.

First, don’t sweat the small stuff. If you’re looking at a phrase in the text and can’t decide whether it should be “it is” or “it’s”—or worse, if you’re switching from “it is” to “it’s” and then back again—guess what? Let it go! Whatever choice you make at this point, the reader will assume that it is (or it’s) the choice you wanted and intended. When your operations become local (changing words) and no longer global (changing the book’s DNA), you know you’re done.

If you still can’t let it go, invoke the twenty-year rule, which proposes that if it won’t matter in twenty years, it doesn’t matter now. Will it matter in twenty years whether you used “it is” or “it’s?” Of course not. So smooth out those wrinkles to your heart’s content, make any choice that feels right, and then move on. Your energy and critical eye are better spent elsewhere.

TO TRUST YOUR “YES,” HAVE A RELIABLE “NO”

So that’s what to do with tiny, unimportant decisions, but what about big, important ones? Suppose at this late date, for example, you start to mistrust your ending. You’ve rewritten it four, five, six times, and you’re still not sure it’s right. You know that it’s too big an issue to ignore—this will matter in twenty years, damn it!—but you don’t know how to close the book on your book. Fortunately I have a strategy for this, too. It’s a little tricky to master but worth taking on.

When we work as editors of our own work, especially when we’re coming to the finish line or deadline or any other sort of line we see looming in the middle distance, we have a strong tendency to examine our creative decisions through the filter of hope. We hope the ending works. We hope the tone is pleasing and consistent. We hope the funny stuff is funny. We hope we haven’t radically overused the words ameliorate or spleen.

So we hope, but we don’t know. Why? Because we’re frail and we have egos. We want to be done so badly that we know we can fool ourselves into thinking we are done, even when significant issues remain, hidden to our eyes and ready to blow up, spectacularly and destructively, once the book is out of our hands. We fear that we’re lying to ourselves and we seem powerless to stop. What can be done about this?

Here’s what: Have a no you can trust. Invest all your energy and objectivity into looking at your work and words and saying, “Nope, not good enough,” and again, “Nope, not good enough,” and yet again, “Nope, still not.” All these times of saying no will send you back into the manuscript, back to fixing things you know need fixing, because you’ve been honest enough with yourself to say so. Then one day you wake up and—mirabile visu!—you see that you’ve fixed the things that needed fixing. If you’re looking at a page of prose and you can’t find anything wrong with it—and you trust your reliable no—then you can say yes with confidence and move on.

Filtering judgment through hope is a problem almost all of us face, especially late in the game, when we’re so close to the work—so intimately engaged—that we’ve lost perspective. The way out of this trap of doubt is to be hard on yourself when called for so that when you finally feel like you have things right, you’ll know you’re telling the truth.

SQUEEZE OUT THE STUPID

Okay, so here’s where you’re at: You have a mature manuscript that you know basically works. You’re operating on the final fixes, and you’re going at it with clarity: You know you can stop making decisions that don’t matter, and you know you can trust your judgment on the ones that do. What comes next? For me, it’s my favorite part of the process: what I call squeezing out the stupid. I like this part so much because it’s not about struggling to add new words that work but, simply and quite easily, subtracting the ones that don’t.

So what’s “the stupid”? It varies from writer to writer. Redundancies are common culprits. Overuse of words like ameliorate or spleen. Inconsistencies of tone, dialect, or character voice. Clumsy or unclear thoughts. Sentence fragments. For me it’s a big deal to locate and eradicate anything that sounds like me, the author, and not like the characters or narrator. I’m a pretty self-indulgent writer—I like my inside jokes—but I strip away all those self-indulgences at this stage. Basically I’m looking for anything that “takes me off the page,” that is, gets me thinking about the author and his choices rather than the characters and their journey.

Apply this test to your own work. When you’re doing that final quality-control pass through the material and you’re wondering whether something doesn’t belong, just ask yourself if it takes you off the page. If the answer is yes, get it out of there. Now note that when you’re asking a targeted, precise question like “Does this take me off the page?” you’re not asking a vague and useless question like “Is this good writing?” At this stage of the game (and, really, at any stage of the game) the question of whether the writing is any good isn’t helpful. The helpful question is: “Does this writing do the job I intend it to do?” If the answer is no, fix it. If the answer is yes, move on. By evaluating your revisions in terms of simple utility, you step outside the whole trap of value judgement and reach a point where you can actually kill the beast.

KILL THE BEAST

Some people never finish what they start. They might have a manuscript that’s 99 percent ready to go, but they just can’t bring themselves to deliver it to an agent or editor, e-publish it, or print it up on parchment scrolls for distribution to family and close friends. If you ask them why, they might say something like “I want it to be perfect, and it’s not.” Mostly what they mean is: “I am afraid.” I’m afraid that if I kill this monster and fling it to the public, the public will fling it right back to me, wrapped in the day-old newsprint of their scorn and disapproval. I’m afraid of rejection—so afraid that I resist putting myself in a place where I might face it.

Well, guess what? Rejection is your fate. There’s bound to be somebody who doesn’t like your work—and will find a way to tell you. And this will be true whether you spend five months or five years applying the final gloss. There’s no such thing as perfect. The pursuit of perfection is really just procrastination, and procrastination is really just fear. You have to get over that, because the worst that can happen—that your work is ignored by the world—will definitely happen if you never send it out. Measured against this benchmark, then, any outcome—any response whatsoever—is better than what you’d receive if you never killed your precious beast and gave it the ol’ heave ho.

I used to spend about four minutes of fretting for every one minute of real writing. Twenty-five books on, I’ve reversed the proportion: Now it’s about one minute of worry for every four minutes of craft. That’s not bad. I’m happy with that ratio. But I’m also realistic: I no more expect to be completely free from fear in my writing process than I expect to stop overusing ameliorate or spleen. Fear is natural. In a way, it’s even useful. It tells you that you’re working in the fruitful territory between your comfort zone and the interesting unknown. Fear—yes, fear!—tells you that you’re growing as a writer. So embrace your fear, acknowledge it as a legitimate part of your creative process, stare it down, and then walk on by.

TAKE THE WIN

Every time you finish writing a book, you achieve two goals. First, of course, you’ve written your book. You’ve gotten your story out of the fragile and ephemeral vessel of your brain and into the slightly less fragile and less ephemeral vessel of e-book or print (or parchment scroll). So that’s one win. Here’s the other: You’ve improved. You have improved your writing to the exact tune of all the research, rough drafts, rewrites, edits, revisions, polishes, and squeezing out of stupid that you invested in the work. That’s not nothing. In fact, it’s everything. It means that next time your process will be more efficient. You’ll do it better, faster, and with less angst, especially in the end game, because now you have the tools to blast doubt to smithereens. You now know how to do the following:

• Smooth the right wrinkles.
• Trust your yes.
• Squeeze out the stupid.
• Kill the beast.
• Take the win.

Especially take the win. I do. I do it with every book I write. After I’m done, I pause to reflect on the challenges I faced in the writing, the discoveries I made about myself and my craft, and above all the fact that I have completed this large, improbable, stunningly difficult to contemplate, yet somehow mysteriously and magically executed thing called a book. I take the win. I congratulate myself on work well done or at least on work, well, done. I let that good feeling wash over me, and I definitely make time and space to enjoy it. Sometimes I take myself out to dinner. I worked so hard to finish a book that the least I can do is pat myself on the back.

The least you can do is to take the win. Your book is done. It had its challenges, but you met them. It had its problems, but you solved them and got it done. So take pride in that because what you’ve done now separates you from the almost eight billion people on the planet who will never write a book. You’re a storyteller … an author. You are a breed apart. Gosh, you’re Winston Churchill!

And if that’s not mighty, I don’t know what is.