Gurgh. He's right.

[elfs]

It's been a crappy day of debugging a great language with terrible debugging tools, and on top of that I stumble upon Varieties of Insanities Known To Affect Authors.

I count myself guilty of several:

• He wrote that how fast? And that's his first draft? Aaaargh! He's the real writer. I'm just a talentless plodder who's put together a bag of tricks.
  
  
• I'm not a real writer. I don't know what I'm doing. I just dash this stuff off. For some reason, people seem to like it. Or anyway, they've liked it so far.
  
  
• He's a real writer. I just make stuff up. He writes from the heart. Alternately: He's genuinely creative— a real writer. I just endlessly rehash my own stuff.
  
  
• Any day now, everyone's going to see through me.

The last is the most paralyzing.

Comments

[xlana.livejournal.com]

Guilty of all the ones you listed, plus the one about "my first book is done, I've done all the hard work, it's going to get easier from here on out."

Original one of mine: "Why should I spend the time describing it when I'm just going to illustrate it when I'm done?"