Navigating Feelings of Inadequacy
When I turned in the final copyedit of THE REAPER, I felt accomplished and excited. After eleven drafts, I was proud of my work and the 100k words I had written. It felt like a real, refined book, something that I would be proud to view on a shelf.
Since drafting THE REAPER in 2022, I’ve written three of its sequels. I can track my progress as a writer through each one, and now, as I sketch the first couple chapters of REAPER 5, it’s clear that the JPB of 2024 is a whole different beast to the one of 2022. Perhaps this is why, when I finally had my pass pages in my hands, and I got to finally read the first proofs of the manuscript, I cringed and felt my insides shrivel into themselves.
The first proofs signal the final stretch of the manuscript’s journey. The pages are printed exactly how they would be in the book, and you get the option to review a hard copy. It’s an exciting part of the journey, and I felt emotional when the DHL man arrived at the door with my book in his hand. Whilst I read through the manuscript to check if I’m happy with the work, a proof reader also combs through the pages in their own time. There will be several rounds of proofs, and as a writer, you are advised to only make small, miniscule changes. The proofs stage is not for substantial edits. This might be another reason why I felt so uncomfortable going through them: a bell tolled in the back of my skull, telling me there was no going back from here, that everything I should have done was already on the page, and I would not get another chance to change my mind about the story.
Shockingly, I found a few misspells here and there, or a couple sentences that read weirdly, like a sudden tense change or a clause that was too long. I was surprised that such errors were still there even after several people had looked over it dozens of times, but that is the beauty of hard copies, and that is the deception of reading from screens. Those little bumps I’m fine with, as I’ve read many traditionally published books with typos and technical errors in them. Those are easily fixable.
What isn’t fixable is the style. I read through my chapters and grew increasingly embarrassed. I skimmed passages and everything read juvenille, a little simplistic. It felt like a first novel, like someone who had only started writing last week. Suddenly, my metaphors all read skewered and the story had de-aged. I thought about the list of authors my publisher had proposed for blurbs and my body went cold. Some of the authors are my literary heroes, people who transformed me whenever I read their words. What could they possibly say about THE REAPER? Not for the first time, I wondered — what was everyone thinking when they made an offer for this thing? They’ve all lost their minds.
The only way to counter that, at least a little bit, was to finish my edits of the proofs. After a day or two, I went back to the chapters that are my personal favourites, just to remind myself that I’m not a bad writer. I also went over the chapters that I made the most changes to. Thankfully, the changes elevated them considerably.
This isn’t something I will ever get over unfortunately. It’s not the first time I’ve read over my own work and felt unhappy or embarrassed, but I suppose this time it felt worse because there’s so much at stake, and I believed that the “this is all crap” idea was firmly buried in draft 5. Turns out, these feelings of inadequacy are cyclical, and they plague many writers — probably all of them.
I’m going to send the changes over to my editor today and I’m hoping that, after the other rounds of proof reads, I’ll return to the confident part of the cycle. I’m going to have to promote this thing a lot over the next year or so. It would help if I like it.