I expected to get more confident of my judgement as I grew older. Instead, though I know what I think - at least, I think I do - I’m often less certain than I used to be of how to express what I’m thinking, or act upon it. Which is a challenge for a writer - and definitely not what a client wants to hear from their agent.
All writers have doubts from time to time about the quality, the value, and the point of our own writing: there’s that little horned monster in your head which sniggers when you fling yourself back in your chair saying ‘That was a good sentence’, and snorts contemptuously when you pour a drink and tell yourself you deserve it.
Mine even has the temerity to question whether sharing the pain or the pleasure of writing on Substack does anything to enrich the lives of its readers, but that’s when I tell it to get lost and tunnel into someone else’s uncertainties. Wrapping words round the things that bother you is a small triumph in itself, and knowing someone might read it is something to celebrate.
It’s easier to be confident about your views of someone else’s work than about your own. As an agent, I always cover myself by telling writers it’s just my opinion in what is a totally subjective business. I owe it to them to be honest, and I know it’s no good taking a Zen view of publishing and say, ‘Look, there are good books that don’t sell, and bad books that do, but in the end most things are forgotten, so what does it matter?’ Because it does matter, very much, especially when all the authors I know regard their books as terrific. They don’t need me to add to their uncertainty.
What causes this uncertainty? First of all, unreliability: people not doing the things they’ve said they would do. It isn’t only politicians who ignore, withdraw, or trample on their pledges: publishers do it too. They promised to promote a book, to give it the cover that will attract the right readership, to ensure it’s on sale in supermarkets as well as bookstores, to obtain favorable puffs from other writers whose followers will leap on your work with a glad cry. And what happens? They stick a bland phrase by an author no one’s heard of on a cover that makes your book look just like all the others in your genre - except yours didn’t even make it to the shelves of a shop, let alone with its cover facing outwards.
But shouldn’t being unable to rely on others’ promises make you more determined to fulfil those you’ve made yourself? Of course it should, if you are a person of integrity, which anyone reading this must be, obviously. But being a good person doesn’t win you many plaudits on social media, where everybody shouts at everyone else because they don’t have to face them in person and behave with decency. You can insult, abuse, and threaten anyone if you do it under a false name and don’t have to witness their reaction. How can you persuade anyone of anything, or be persuaded, if you only communicate digitally, not personally? If you don’t relate to people, you can easily start to think of them as something less than human, and treat them badly, sometimes appallingly so.
So unrelatability joins unreliability as my second driver of uncertainty.
My third driver of uncertainty is untruthfulness. We are told lies all the time, in a barrage so unrelenting we end up believing them, just to get a bit of peace and quiet. The trouble is, we want to believe what people tell us, we want to trust them to do what they say, we want to see them doing the jobs we’ve elected or paid them to do. It’s ingrained in us from childhood to trust the people who claim to love and protect you, to believe what they say, to follow the rules they lay down, which you expect them to follow too.
When they don’t, when they ignore the law and lie about the consequences of doing so, when they characterize anyone who criticizes them as an enemy to be crushed, doesn’t that shred all of our childhood certainties? Is it any wonder we grow less certain about what to say and do, when we have no idea what to believe?
But there are two positives to take from all this. We may not be certain what to do about anything, but that doesn’t mean we have to opt to do nothing. We have to rely on our instincts to tell us what is wrong and what must be done to put it right. Our instincts are older than we are, way older than our intellects, and if our intellect has been bamboozled and battered into a state of dizzy paralysis, our instinct for survival must be allowed to kick in. And if we are to survive, it will.
The other good thing is that sometimes, increasingly often, uncertainty is preferable to the dogma we instinctively know is dangerous. To question what you are told may have got you punished as a child, but in a confused adult it may be the first sign of coming to your senses. Uncertainty about where you are going and what you are doing is way better than the certainty of someone who is leading you over the edge of a cliff.
‘I doubt, therefore I am’ is a mantra that should give us each a little bit of firm ground on which to make a stand.
My book, Still With It!, is available now
"All writers have doubts from time to time" Real writers have doubts all the time : )