"I spent years giving up because I thought I could never be good enough."
#1 Paragraphs, thoughts and quotes from Cathy Rentzenbrink's Write It All Down that I strongly identified with.
There is so much I can identify with in Cathy Rentzenbrink’s Write It All Down. In the above video I did a thirty-five minute flip through which didn’t touch the surface and I have a feeling one Substack article isn’t going to cover it all either. So, this could very well be a series of articles where I pull out inspiring points from Cathy’s excellent book.
Write It All Down is a book for writers who’d like to try writing memoir. However, I strongly believe there’s a lot in there for writers of other non-fiction and fiction as well. Particularly if, like a number of first time novelists, your first book is heavily influenced by your own life.
Cathy has written memoir, non-fiction and fiction. She also teaches writing. She’s a woman in her early fifties who was first published, I think, in her forties, and has struggled hugely with self-doubt. Essentially she is extremely relatable to so many of us.
And this is so important. Because for many, many years I thought it was just me. I thought I was the only one who would berate themselves for being lazy when it was actually fear and overwhelm. I thought it was just me who would look at what other creatives were producing and feel like I couldn’t compete. I thought it was just me who believed I was no good at writing, that I had nothing of interest to say and that people would laugh at me.
But it’s not.
Self-doubt in the creative world is an absolutely normal part of the process. For some it might be off the scale, for others it might be whirring away in the background. As Cathy says “my own work feels like 95% struggle with self-doubt.”
This struggle can be mentally draining. When I was productive and happily writing away during 2022 this is something I’d forgotten about until my ‘crash’ at the end of the year. I’ve not spoken about this yet but there is a reason why I didn’t create as much during January as I would’ve liked to.