A particular moment in my senior project experience is after I had finished chapter three in my novel The Bad Roll. A was very proud of my work and what I had accomplished and remembered how I need to share some of my work with my cohort. As I was looking through the chapter all of my hard work seemed to be worse than when I was writing it. It was crazy the number of things I found wrong with the chapter. I was wonder how I never saw anything wrong with it the first time, then I realized something. It was my anxiety that was making me notice every little problem with my novel. As soon as the idea of sharing my work came into my head I went into editing mode. I will have to overcome this type of thing if I am to improve my writing or learn more about my process. This is important for me to overcome if I am to ever share more of my work as time goes on.
It is not the critique that I am most afraid of, it is the idea of sharing my work with others that scares me. Just the idea of having my work out in the open makes me doubt myself even if I’m not getting a critique. However, I am still terrified of the critique. I’m sure it won’t be a bad experience it’s just nervewracking waiting for feedback. I know the actual experience won’t be bad, but I can’t help but feel a little scared by the idea.
Thanks for sharing these thoughts, Oscar. In my National Novel Writing Month experience, we call that anxious critic inner voice the “Inner Editor.” It’s the part of your writer-self that wants to fix, perfect, change, etc. It’s important to have some (non-anxious, objective-ish) inner editor voices some of the time. The important part is to “turn it off” when you are trying to simply “write more words” rather than edit, revise, perfect. I see you making real strides with this already!