I was very happy to be asked to springboard off my recent post Stella, and a digression on envy, work, inadequacy for the Wheeler Centre blog. Authors Krissy Kneen, Alan Baxter, Max Barry and Mel Campbell kindly and honestly responded to my probing questions about writerly anxieties and feelings of inadequacy, and some of their responses are included in the piece. I thank them very much.
It begins:
A writer’s life is fraught with fear, anxiety and feelings of inadequacy. These feelings cluster around desires and ambitions, arise at the desk itself, hover about at festivals and events, attach themselves to advances, grants and prizes, lurk in one’s inbox and on social media, and pop up in one’s daily life. Even Sylvia Plath wondered about whether both her and Ted Hughes’ writing was ‘good enough’: ‘We get rejections. Isn’t this the world’s telling us we shouldn’t bother to be writers?’
Read the rest here.