The power of self-doubt
As a writer, you need to question everything, especially yourself - according to Richard Askwith at least
Being a writer is a lonely profession. Sometimes I almost forget I am a writer, and I feel more like a bored teenager sitting up in my room writing up my diary, spiralling off in my thoughts, tapping away on my laptop.
And then I log on to a Zoom meeting with my editor. Wait, I have an editor? He’s talking about the publicity department, publishing schedules. I have a publisher too. A well-established, serious organisation with fancy offices in central London. The sort of place I used to walk by and daydream about being one of those writers I could see heading in there for meetings, and what a mad life that must be. And then I’d go home and sit in my room, and tap away on my laptop.
I always get this thought when I’m writing, and I’ve had it with all my books: “Why will anyone care about this?”
I’m not a famous runner, or a particularly fast one. On my run around Ireland, nothing that crazy happened - I wasn’t kidnapped or attacked by bears or taken to some mad island by the banshees. I just ran around a lot. Isn’t that just a bit boring?
“If you think your book is boring, you’re probably on the right track,” Richard Askwith told me recently. I’m not entirely sure what he meant, but I grabbed on to it. He said being over-confident as a writer and thinking everything you wrote was brilliant was almost certainly deluded, whereas a heavy dose of self-doubt would only make you a better writer.
In any case, my editor said he was excited to read what I had written. Once I was ready to show it to him. It still seemed mad to me that this editor at Faber & Faber was excited to read my warblings.
I remember when I first pitched Running with the Kenyans, and Faber were interested. I was invited to a meeting with the head of Faber, and an editor, a publicist, the foreign rights manager, and god knows who else. And the head of Faber started gushing about my sample chapter, telling me with genuine excitement: “We all love this piece of writing.”
It was a short account of me running a 10K in Wiltshire. Really? They loved it? I wanted to look at that pile of papers in his hand - I even tried to glance at them - to check that really was my piece of writing he had there. Maybe it was a terrible mistake? Maybe they thought I was someone else? Maybe I was in the wrong room?
In any case, the self-doubt lives on, and even after three successful books, I still wonder if I can actually write, if anyone really cares about my run around Ireland, or if anyone will actually want to read it.
I’ve been so immersed in my own story that I went to see The Salt Path in the cinema this past weekend, and the parallels between the film and my run around Ireland kept leaping out at me. If you haven’t seen it, or read the book, it’s about a couple in their 50s who suddenly find themselves homeless, and the husband finds out he has an incurable, degenerative disease. Facing such bleak and sudden hopelessness, they decide to walk the South West Coast Path - a 1,000km trail around south-west England.
Of course, I don’t have such a dramatic premise for my run, but the extreme lows and highs along the way, the sense of being out in the elements, of traversing long distances, of meeting people randomly and fleetingly, all had echos of my story. I kept looking at the way the film had balanced the highs and lows, and questioning whether I had got that balance right in my book. It didn’t want to soar into hyperbole too much, but neither did it want to wallow in the struggle. I thought the film did it well.
Unfortunately, many of the people I went to see the film with didn’t like it at all, saying it was one-dimensional and implausible. I immediately questioned my book. Maybe people will say the same? Ping, straight back to self-doubt. Which is healthy, right, Richard?
And around it goes.
The writing is also impacting my running, as I try to squeeze everything in. Twice this week I thought I’d start writing early and then run later. Why. Do. I. Never. Learn?
If I run first, the mind is awake, the body feels calm, and the writing flows more easily. If I don’t run first, I feel unsettled, and I spend the day fretting and wondering when I can go and run, until it inevitably gets late enough for me to say to myself, “I might as well go in the morning now.”
It’s an endless cycle, the trials and tribulations of the amateur runner who sets himself a lofty goal, and would love to dedicate himself to it like a professional athlete, but for whom real life gets in the way.
I imagine it’s like that for many amateur writers, people who know they have a story to tell, but find it hard to carve out the time to write. Hmmm … I think I’m convincing myself which of my two passions should be taking priority right now. As much as it often doesn’t feel like it, I am a professional writer, and sitting up in my room, tapping away on my laptop, is my actual job.
The fast 5K will just have to wait.