Adam Haslett on the Uses of Doubt

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

We all of us have voices in our head. Most of them rattle on about quotidian matters (Brush your teeth, Remember your keys, I want pesto); many of them anxious (You’re late! Will this pain in my back never end? I’m out of pesto!); and some even dulcet (How vivid that tree against that sky, Thank goodness for my friend, This is the best parmesan I’ve ever tasted).

But when it comes to the act of writing, the voice I hear most often is that of my imagined reader. Who this person is can change from paragraph to paragraph. If, on a given morning, no one else has woken up in my head yet, there’s always the voice of the general reader (Who cares!? Could we just move along here? You’re writing about this again?). Then, as the morning goes on, particular voices arise.

I might, for instance, hear my friend Paul whisper, Decent sentence, but are those the only nouns you got? Or my mother: I know where you took that wallpaper from, and it wasn’t nearly that ornate. Other voices are more choral, like, say, Other Writers, or The Critics. For me, these are the most obstreperous. They lurk unheard in the shadows then, all of a sudden, shout their judgments. They wither, they dismiss, they chuckle. And that’s when my fingers come off the keyboard, I lean back in my chair, and I doubt.

There is, of course, no worthwhile writing that hasn’t overcome doubt of some kind. dWithout doubt there would be no cause to edit. But I’m talking here about the close quarters of sentence-to-sentence composition in which individual sounds, images, and thoughts arise, and then, before they are allowed the space to unfurl, are killed off by my own instantaneous conjecture about what others would make of them: Dull! Sentimental! Hackneyed! Portentous! Pick your poison. It doesn’t much matter which because it doesn’t take much to quash something as evanescent as the glimmer of an idea. On the bad days, or in the bad seasons, this silencing voice spreads its judgment from the sentence to the page and from there onto the whole endeavor. The doubt becomes radical: this is no good, you’re no good, drop it, stop it, throw it away.

What to do? How to write when a voice like this holds sway? I suspect there are as many answers as there are people who have finished books because, unless you’re an egomaniac, it’s hard to complete any piece of writing without, at some point, believing it’s impossible or pointless or both.

For years, I navigated this recurring juncture in the process quite poorly. Blind to how the smaller judgments—those seemingly innocuous rejections of phrases in individual sentences—fed, day by day, the larger conviction that my work lacked life altogether, I unwittingly allowed that conviction to take hold. And thus I found myself fighting radical doubt almost daily. Against that force of judgment, my only choice seemed to be to wage a kind of war of attrition. I simply tried to outlast the critics in my head. I’d spend hours at my desk sneaking down a few piddling lines, often then erased. In this endless back and forth, I discovered that if I ate nothing while writing, pushing lunch later and later into the afternoon, the internal critics grew tired before I did. And so, for the last forty-five minutes or an hour of a day’s work, my blood sugar low, feeling slightly light-headed, I’d find myself in the clear, able to compose. I was writing, all too often, out of sheer determination.

Over the course of years, however, I began to take more notice of those not-so-innocuous beginnings: the erasing of the verb that part of me actually liked the sound of, or the step back from an image that felt too exposed. In this, I was aided, well beyond words, by meditation. I’ve meditated each morning before writing for twenty years now, yet for a long time the practice was utilitarian, an attempt to push aside only those loudest voices in my head so that I could write anything at all.

But as time has gone on, with practice and reading and learning from teachers, something broader has come into view: the motion of the mind itself. How the tree against the sky and the little bodily ache and the wish for pasta and the hundred other barely apprehended apprehensions are endlessly jumbled together along with the judgments and the self-criticism. And that if you’re able to calm the brain to the point of seeing this jumble itself as it unfolds, to adopt toward your own consciousness what Freud, in another context, described as “evenly suspended attention,” then, by the grace of our natural minds, you can, at least for moments here and there, free yourself from the tyranny of distraction.

What has this meant for me as a writer? A lot, in fact. Now more often (though hardly always), when I find myself in the midst of composing a sentence and a critical thought pipes up to cut me short—I pause. And then I wonder: Why now? What is it about this image or scene or character that has excited my internal doubters? In short, what am I afraid of? Because, having done this now over and over and over, I’ve come to realize how much of my doubt is actually fear—of being judged, of being shamed.

And when, instead of simply hitting the delete key, and waiting for my critics to die of starvation, I try answering the question of what’s making me afraid, I’m able to sense—and more importantly to use—the enormous energy and intelligence that fear contains. Its eye for detail is peerless, its ear keen (its purpose, after all, is to keep us alive). So while it may over-perceive, fear captures so much a mind in lassitude does not. What if, then, instead of all this acumen being used up to prevent you from moving forward, it became a useable intelligence? What if it became a guide?

It took decades, and I can hardly claim to have mastered it, but for me, on the better days, writing has become less a war of attrition and more an act of curiosity. This has the obvious benefit of allowing me to enter more deeply into the world I am trying to create for that imagined reader, who I can now sometimes even imagine as sympathetic. But it allows for something else as well, something that for too long I didn’t even realize I was missing in the act of writing, and that’s pleasure.

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Mothers and Sons by Adam Haslett is available now via Little, Brown.