The Unfinished Statue
There is a problem that I have struggled with for years now: comparing someone’s final version with my first draft. The cycle is endless, and even though I know the solution to this problem, it never goes away. Maybe I love feeling inferior, or maybe it’s impostor syndrome that makes me feel that I am not good enough. No matter how much I create, I feel I haven’t done enough.
This is specific to writing. In other areas of life, I get excited by even the smallest of my achievements, but when it comes to writing, even my most profound essays don’t satisfy me. There are ideas I have mentioned here that came naturally to me. I realised this when I later encountered the same ideas in a book or on social media, and wondered how I had somehow arrived at the same conclusion without ever reading an academic paper on it.
With fiction, this problem goes one step deeper because I generally read the best fiction writers in the business and then compare their storytelling with mine, which is mostly in its first draft and hasn’t received a single rewrite. This makes me stay away from writing fiction because I cannot sit with mediocrity. This is the part that gets to me most: my aversion to mediocrity.
The simple truth that I have begun to realise is that I am not going to have a polished version of my stories immediately. I am trying to build a statue out of marble, but the statue comes at the end. For most of the process, I am going to be looking at a rough, unpolished and unstructured slab of marble, with only a hint of my vision somewhere within it. The polishing has to happen gradually, eventually. Only at the end will that statue emerge, one that I can be proud of. But even that moment will be short-lived because then I will pick up another slab of marble.
If you are someone who is struggling with the same problem, there is some solace in knowing that you are not alone. I write every day here, so maybe once I solve this problem, and I will have to if I ever dream of becoming a disciplined fiction writer who produces one book a year, I will have learned to deal with this problem sooner rather than later.