Writing and Doubt

I found a lovely quote by Julia Cameron: “For an artist, “I don’t know” is the hard time. It is the season between seasons when you are not sure what you are making and if you are making anything worthwhile. All artists go through seasons of rooted joy and seasons of rootless restlessness and doubt. It goes with the territory. If we knew, always, what is is we know, there would be no new land to push forward to. We would do and redo what it is we do – and that is not the artist’s life. Ours is a life of invention.”

Sitting with “I don’t know” and doubt and restlessness is an odd thing. Confidence comes with experience, but not, I think, for writers. The doubt returns, over and over, as we struggle to pin down exactly what the story is trying to be. And yet it’s that very exploration that’s so fascinating.

Maureen