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A writer sometimes needs encouragement.

There are, perhaps, writers who are sure of their own greatness. Most walk more often – sometimes perennially – in the company of doubt. Awaken in doubt-light, dress in doubt-jeans, wash face in the morning with doubt’s cold water and lie down at day’s end between doubt’s unwarmed sheets: for months on end, the portrait of a working writer.

The best practice is not to engage with the question of one’s own work’s worth at all — except when revising.  While revising, doubt is undoubtedly and boundlessly useful, though even then, a skeptical relationship to what you are doing works best in the service of only one question. That question is not: is this good? It is not: is this bad? It is only: how can this be better?

Writing a first draft is closer to what you do after finding yourself thrown in deep water: you swim. And on the other end of things, when the work — novel, poem, essay, short story — is finished, you don’t stand around admiring it or insulting it. You go on to the next, or cook dinner.  

Larger doubt – great doubt – is needed. There are times when a writer pauses, feels in awareness some version of the Chinese verse inked onto the wooden block and mallet instrument that announces time in Soto Zen monasteries:

        Life is transient, swiftly passing.
        Wake up! Attend!
        Coming and going matters.
        Do not squander this life.

Great doubt’s questioning attention is indispensable to conducting a life unwasted. But small doubt – the doubt of ego and mirror – is useless, a precarity. W. S. Merwin’s poem “Berryman” (findable online and worth re-reading in full), ends with a conversation between the undergraduate Merwin and his then-professor:

        I asked how can you ever be sure
        that what you write is really
        any good at all and he said you can’t

        you can’t you can never be sure
        you die without knowing
        whether anything you wrote was any good
        if you have to be sure don’t write

“You will die without knowing.” The thought is, heard as intended, a liberation and grant of freedom. Writing can only fully unfold in a field of non-weighing, non-judging. You need to take chances to forget your place in the book of existence and make a new one.

Some thoughts of Jorge Luis Borges from the prologue to his last book of poems offer a different mode of escape from self-judgment and doubt:

After all these years, I have observed that beauty, like happiness, is frequent. A day does not pass when we are not, for an instant, in paradise. There is no poet, however mediocre, who has not written the best line in literature, but also the most miserable ones. Beauty is not the privilege of a few illustrious names. It would be rare if this book did not contain one single secret line worthy of staying with you to the end.  -Jorge Luis Borges, January 9, 1985  (tr. by Willis Barnstone)

Anyone who puts words onto paper cannot help but stumble their way into adding to the sum and storehouse of paradise. Borges’s generosity, addressed to himself and to all writers, is also a curative, an antidote to self-doubt’s silencing grip. Good lines will come, bad lines will come. For either to happen, both must happen; a person who wants to write needs first to be writing. The lines worthy of staying will stay. The others will vanish.

Paper is inexpensive: you can always revise, discard, try something else. Language, too, is generous, its discoveries available and frequent, abundant as wild grass seeds on an unmown hill. Language does not begrudge or judge its own spending. It makes its own newness and carries its world-alterations profligately, freely. Its generative possibilities and stored wisdoms pass through us – our fears, hopes, stories, imaginings, and days – as ordinarily and continuously as life itself does. A thought I find also encouraging.

 

Writing “some of the most important poetry in the world today” (The New York Times Magazine), Jane Hirshfield is the author most recently of The Asking: New & Selected Poems (Knopf, 2023); two collections of essays; and four books collecting and co-translating world poets from the deep past. Hirshfield’s honors include the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Translated into seventeen languages, Hirshfield is a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and an elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.