Dutch-Elm Disease for Creative Minds

This is part one of a good piece that appeared on the New York Times web
        page -- Sunday, December 8, 2013. Italics and highlights are mine.

                      --  Butch Ekstrom

                                                                                                                                        Illustration by Tom Gauld

By MARK O’CONNELL

      Not long ago, I attended something called the Web Summit, a massive tech-industry conference held in Dublin. The event had a two-tier structure: on one level, it was a vast, teeming trade show at which early-stage start-ups were given the opportunity to set out their stalls and sell themselves — to venture capitalists, angel investors, media people — and to network with one another; but on a more elevated plane, it was a grand conclave of the tech industry’s high priests, who came from all over the world (though mostly Northern California) to deliver talks and public interviews to audiences of several thousand. 

     For most of the conference, I wandered among the crowds and jotted things down in my conspicuously antediluvian notebook, indulging myself in an essayist-at-large routine, partly encouraged by an editor at Wired who expressed an interest in my writing something about the Irish technology-start-up ecosystem. After sufficient exposure to this stuff —– to 20-minute multimedia presentations, “fireside chats” with victorious founders, public pitches to panels of venture capitalists — my perception of these entrepreneurial people began to blur to the point where they converged, all of them, into one breezily self-assured dude with a cordless head mike and an overinvestment in the concept of disruption.       

     I also noticed that this composite dude (late 30s, suit jacket, jeans) had a common tendency to place himself, personally, at the center of his business’s narrative, and that this narrative tended to involve some triumph over the skepticism of others, of those who said that it (whatever it was: a smartphone app for ordering taxis, say, or a new kind of online payment model) couldn’t be done. The engine that seemed to drive all this ambition and achievement, all this ceaseless and remorseless disruption of everything not nailed to the floor, was a hot and incorruptible core of self-belief.

And as I was noticing this, I was also increasingly preoccupied by the extent to which I myself lacked this internal combustion of self-confidence.

      

     Even as I filled page after page of my notebook with observations and snatches of overheard
dialogue, I found that I was essentially unconvinced by my own performance as the literary interloper, as the man of letters at large in the assembly of numbers. In my tepid blood, in my timid little heart, I did not feel it with any persuasive force.

      

     I knew almost nothing about the topic I was supposed to be writing on and would have little of interest to say about it no matter what I learned. Nothing, I felt sure, was likely to come of my efforts. Less than nothing; I was wasting my time, whatever that might be worth on the open market. I saw a keen absurdity in these barons of techno-capital, with their passionately held clichés and their cheerful belief in their personal capacity to change the world, but I found myself wishing forlornly that some of that confidence, that profitable self-delusion, might rub off on me.

      

     Because if I had to identify a single element that characterizes my life as a writer, a dominant affective note, it would be

self-doubt

     It is a more-or-less constant presence in everything I do. It is there even as I type these words, in my realization that almost all writers struggle in this way; that the notion of a self-doubting writer is as close to tautology as to make no difference, and that to refer to such a thing as a “struggle” is to concede the game immediately to cliché, to lose on a technicality before you’ve even begun.

      

     The concept of “the inner critic” is one the self-improvement industry is fond of invoking, generally with reference to the various methods by which it might be silenced or banished. But the problem with my inner critic is that it’s inseparable from my outer critic, which is the means by which I earn a fair proportion of what for rhetorical purposes I will call “my living.”

     I’ve spent so much of my adult life writing criticism — as an academic and then as a former academic writing about books and culture — that I have begun to detect a sort of hypertrophic enlargement of the part of my brain that looks at what the other parts are doing or planning to do and says, “Sorry, chief, but that’s not going to cut it.” My concern here is that I have inadvertently allowed my inner critic to become the writer in residence of my very soul.

 
And I’m ambivalent about this, as I am in matters of significance.

I often wonder, in my more self-indulgent moments, by which, I suppose, I mean all the time, what I might have achieved if I had not so often and so easily fallen prey to self-doubt: all the things I might have written, all the books and essays and so on, and how good they might have been.       

      I feel certain, in these moments, that I would be a great deal more successful and productive if my inner critic had not been afforded this tenured position from which to shoot down anything not measuring up to its supposedly exacting standards . . .

      

     To put it in the sort of simplistic terms that I’ll no doubt come to regret using:

self-doubt is the best friend and the worst enemy of the writer

     Because being a writer isn’t like being a tennis player or a boxer, where you presumably have to hunt down and ruthlessly eliminate the source of any flickering shadow of suspicion that you might not be destined for victory. As a writer, you have to take your own misgivings seriously; you have to attend, now and then, to the little voice in your head or the booming baritone in your gut that wishes you to know that what you are writing is entirely without value.

     The trick, of course, is to know when to listen to it and when to tell it to shut it . . . I say this as someone who has never quite learned that particular trick.

     And so because I seem congenitally predisposed to doubt myself, I tend to err on the side of caution with these things; I tend to listen to what the inner critic is saying, on the assumption that it probably knows what it’s talking about . . . .

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