Nervous Nelly Rides (Writes) Again
Can I turn down the sensitivity on this thing?
Last year, I found myself in the market for a new car after my son totaled the one the kids shared. I ended up with my first-ever EV and, despite an adjustment period and a bit of a learning curve on charging, it’s been great. The car sports some space-age features and looks a bit like Marty McFly’s DeLorean, so it feels on brand for me.
I call her Nervous Nelly, though, because, her driver-assistance features are, in car reviewer lingo, “a little on the sensitive side.” That means she’s often pretty highly tuned to outside stimulus and reacts with a lot of beeping and dashboard warnings that feel a little overblown. It certainly makes things like parallel parking a challenge when she prefers a constant 3’ safety bubble around its bumpers at all times.
Like Nelly, most of us have our writerly nervous systems tuned on the sensitive side. How else can we invent new worlds, new characters, new stories? We absorb things from the world around us, synthesize them with those finely tuned nervous systems, and assemble them into stories that make sense of the world for ourselves and our readers. It’s our greatest super power.
But that writerly super power can also be a burden. Because sometimes the stories we synthesize don’t end up on paper. Instead, they rattle around in our brains. Stories about why an agent or editor didn’t say yes. Stories about why a reader left a snarky review. Stories about how we’re screwing everything up if we don’t write X words a day or finish a book a year or read more or spend more time making witty posts on social media. Stories about why someone else out there has achieved whatever writing milestone we set our heart on better/faster/cooler than we did.
It can really activate those warning systems. And just as those beeps and flashes distract me as I’m driving Nelly down the road, they can distract us from doing the work. They can send us into a spiral that takes us even farther from our goals, makes us feel like whatever we’re trying to do is hopeless. pointless. impossible.
Slaying those doubt demons when they pipe up can be tough. But doing so is the key to doing the work and sending that work out into the world with confidence instead of fear.
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