Erin Lodes

The first time I spoke with John, he was going through a first chapter diagnosis with me. And I have no idea how from so few words he diagnosed such an incredible problem with my writing, but he did. He said something to me that has been stuck in my head for weeks and weeks now. I’m sure it will stay there for-basically-ever.

He was worried to tell me, since it could have come across rather harshly and sent me dissolving into a ball of tears in the corner of his Skype screen. But I was prepared. Or at least I thought I was. I hadn’t had anyone offering me solid critique for a quite a while and I was craving it. I consider it to be the whet stone I can sharpen my craft against.

But what he said wasn’t what I was expecting.

“Someone needs to get this girl some confidence.”

Now, if you went to all the people I know and asked them what I need more of, confidence wouldn’t even make it on the list. I jump out of airplanes and move to foreign countries. I readily offer opinions on political topics in the company of relatives I know disagree with me wholeheartedly.

So, at first, I swallowed the comment and his reasoning behind it and tried to see how I needed to apply what he was saying to my writing. But in the days and weeks after that first coaching session, as I continued to work with him and he started coaching me on plotting out my novel, I couldn’t get the phrase out of my head.

“Someone needs to get this girl some confidence.”

And it wasn’t until two things happened that I think I finally understood what he was saying.

First, I spent a solid six hours plotting out scenes so I could finish my outline before our scheduled meeting. It was the most detailed outline I’d ever done and I did the majority of it in those six hours. Now, I’ve always been great at deadlines. In college, I once did a paper early and sat down to polish it up the morning it was due and ended up entirely rewriting the ten pages because I had a better idea. I do some of my best work when I’m crunching a deadline.

And I think I’ve finally figured out why.

I’ve spent years and years thinking about this book. I’ve come up with multiple unsatisfactory outlines and drafted A LOT. I’ve gone through millions (okay maybe not millions but like a ton okay) options for scenes. But somehow just never nailed it down the way I did that Sunday morning before meeting with John. And it was because the deadline, the fact that I was going to be going through it all with John, forced me to make decisions.

I’d been hung up on well this could happen or this could happen or really it could go this way too. And I’d been hesitating to make the decisions because I was worried I’d make the wrong ones. And I knew I could change it and I knew it wasn’t set it stone and I knew that the outline would probably be changing at least somewhat anyway and I knew all that. And still I couldn’t make the decision.

And the push of the deadline gave me what I needed. A reason to ignore the doubting, questioning voices in my head and make the fucking decisions that needed to be made. In that zone, with my headphones repeating the same playlist over and over, with my multiple cups of tea, with my note cards and my pen and my laptop, with the appointment with John getting ever-closer, I was the master of my story. I was choosing how to tell it and trusting that what I chose was good, trusting that I was good enough at my craft to do this. In that zone, I had confidence. Confidence in my ability to tell the story I wanted to tell.

“Someone needs to get this girl some confidence.”

The second thing that happened was I read John’s latest blog post, where he rants delightfully about this common thing I’ve seen (and probably done) on Twitter where writers complain their characters aren’t listening to them. I’d never thought too deeply about the implications of statements like that. But John has. (Seriously go read the whole post, it’s full of goodies like this.)

“It’s neither cute nor useful to your craft or your business to perpetuate the idea that you’re not in control of your characters, that they’re just these people and you don’t have any say in what they do. That’s a great way to dismiss your own creativity, reinforce the idea that you’re not good enough to have or own your own ideas, and sound like an absolute prattling amateur who doesn’t really want to do anything beyond faffing around at a mediocre-at-absolute-best level of craft and production because the idea that you’re in charge of your stuff is scary. And responsibility for the potential success you might have if you actually got your head out of your preferred orifice and gave a shit about your dreams can often feel very overwhelming.”

I must have read this section half a dozen times. And in my head all I could hear was John.

“Someone needs to get this girl some confidence.”

And I could see all the times in the parts of my manuscript I’d already drafted where I used question marks and sentences with opposing opinions that cancel each other out and hesitated to have my narrator make a declarative statement. Because I didn’t have the confidence to carve my characters out of marble instead of mud. To believe I was making the right cuts and sanding the right places and chiseling out incredibly life-like people that belong in the Louvre. I was worried I’d mess up. So I made them out of mud in my backyard. And they kept getting washed away in the rain and no one would ever see them the way I saw them in my head. Because I lacked confidence. (Even now I’m questioning all the ways that metaphor could be completely and entirely wrong even though it totally feels right to me.)

It all came together then. So I’ve decided to say fuck that. Fuck not having confidence in myself. Fuck not having confidence in my craft and my ability to make decisions about my own goddamn story. Fuck not having confidence in my ability to achieve my dreams. Fuck all that shit to each individual level of hell.

And I’m sure I’ll still struggle with it. (Today for instance I realized I phrase questions to John as “Can I…” when I should be phrasing them as “How do I…”) But at least now the monster has a name. Confidence. Names always make things easier to fight. And hell if I don’t relish a good fight.

How I Finished My Novel is going to be an ongoing blog series detailing how I finish this freaking thing. I know, I know, you could probably tell that from the title… I’m being helped along on this journey by John Adamus, who is amazing and you’ll hear a lot about him in this blog series.

If you haven’t already, check out Part One.