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

[mothball-07.livejournal.com]

That last one affects all sorts - not just writers. Common thread in the Math research group I was in, and again in grad school in CS.

You just have to look around and think "They all think their fakes too."