Negative monologues

Last night I was at my monthly Portsmouth Writers' Hub meeting. Our guest speaker was local playwright and radio dramatist Lucy Flannery, and she was giving us a workshop on writing a monologue.  At present I'm writing a non-fiction book about coping with rejection and the horrors of engaging with the publishing industry, and it struck me that the voices which we so often hear in our heads are whispering their own special brand of monologue.  A very negative variety.

There's the Critic, whom Martha Beck in her book Steering by Starlight calls our Inner Lizard.  This is the voice which asks you who you think you are when we dare to dream big.  The Critic will launch into long monologues in our heads about something we messed up, or relive some negative feedback we've received.  "Who do you thing you're kidding?" It asks when we voice our dream to be a world-wide best selling author.  "You can't even keep your tenses straight in your stories."

These negative monologues can really feed our self-doubt if we don't challenge them.  If we're already feeling a lack of confidence about our latest project the last thing we need is the Critic starting up its nasty little negative monologue in our mind.  And even when we do get published we still might fall prey to an attack of negative monologues.  If our editor wants us to rewrite part of our manuscript we can beat ourselves up about that too.  "See," the Critic whines, "you don't really know how to structure your stories properly, do you?"

And the negative monologues don't stop even when we are published.  Then we're quite likely to fall under attack from the Imposter Syndrome .  The Imposter's negative monologue tells us that we don't really belong here.  When our book comes out everybody will hate it.  They'll all see that you can't write, and they'll all give you negative reviews.

Combating these negative monologues is vital.  Merely knowing that writers like Neil Gaiman suffer constantly from imposter syndrome can help.  We're not alone.  We could try writing some affirmations. "I am a powerful and successful writer" we can say.  

Affirmations need to be repeated regularly, and take time to have an effect, but if you stick with them they can be a powerful weapon against the negative monologues that might otherwise stop you in your tracks.  And the goal is to keep writing at all costs, despite the voices in our heads.