April 11, 2006
Over on Lee Goldberg's blog he posted a post from John Connolly talking about how he goes through periods in which he believes his work is a total unmitigated disaster.

PJ Parrish responded with a ditto post, talking about her night terrors about this.

If you hunt around on Tess Gerritsen's blog, she talks about this, about sleepless nights, etc.

I don't, as a rule, spend my nights worrying about my fiction. Probably because I'm not making a living off it.

I do, however, almost always have a period somewhere in the novel, where I think, "Boy, is this crap. Nobody's going to like this. My agent not only won't be able to sell it, she'll hate it and won't even try."

My reaction to this is to convince myself that I can't judge it at that stage, to keep plugging along. The number of times I have thought something was indifferent, put it aside, and read it a few months later and thought, "Hey, this is pretty good!" are numerous. The most notable would be "Dirty Deeds," which became my first published novel. I had written about 140 pages, give or take, and gave it up, figuring it was shit and nobody would ever publish it. 4 or 5 months later I was trying to figure out what to do and I picked up the remnant, which wouldn't leave my head, sprawled out on the couch and read the pages, and thought, "Hey, this is pretty good." And promptly picked up where I left off, finished the manuscript and sold it to the second publisher to look at it.

I think this reaction is normal. It's one of the things that makes the fiction writing gig so difficult. Every project is a leap of faith--yes, I can do this; yes, I am good; yes, the project/story/novel is good.

There may very well be authors out there who don't ever have this feeling. I wonder what meds they're on.

Best,
Mark Terry