Taming Self-Doubt as a Writer

and Honoring Your Experience Through Memoir

There are times I hate everything I’ve ever written and want to burn it all.

But, in truth, I don’t write to be read. I write because that is how I explain life to myself. It’s also how I have communicated since I was little and shy about talking. I’ve never been good at thinking on my feet when it comes to verbal expression. I analyze and mull and look for the core of emotion that presents itself. Then I carve out all the unnecessary words until only the bones of the feeling remain. That, to me, is the heart of understanding.

Must we edit and question ourselves as writers? Is the story we are telling significant? Universal? Will anyone care? Over the summer, I listened to an episode of Alan Alda’s podcast, Clear and Vivid. He was interiewing novelist and poet, Ann Patchett. I enjoyed listening to her banter with Alan about process, technique, story-building, etc. And then she said something that really stuck in my head, (and I’m paraphrasing because I was driving) and that was, “I can teach you to write, but I can’t teach you to have something to say.”

I tossed that statement around in my head for the next week. Having navigated most of the way through an MFA in Non-Fiction, I’ve heard enough rhetoric about grabbing and sustaining a reader’s attention to last… well at…