I ran across a description of one of my enemies….DOUBT! And it got me to thinking. Author, Jacqueline Winspear wrote: “Doubt. Was it an emotion? A sense? Or was it just a short stubby word to describe a response that could diminish a person in a finger snap?”
I wrote earlier about my being in good company. Regardless if we writers are obscure or famous, we all doubt ourselves and our work. What if Henry Charles Bukowski, or Ernest Hemingway, or John Steinbeck had let DOUBT win? Put away their pen, dumped their scribbles into a shoe box and made a trip to the attic, got a day job and never wrote another word? It doesn’t bear thinking about.
J. Michael Straczynski: “When in ‘doubt’, blow something up.”
F.Scott Fitzgerald: “All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.”
E.M. Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
Tapani Bagge: “Everything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. 
And later on you can use it in some story.”
Maya Angelou: “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
Elinor Lipman: “Critics have been described as people who go into the street after battle and shoot the wounded.”
Leo Rosten: “The only reason for being a professional writer is that you just can’t help it.”
Let’s see …..when were my worst moments? DOUBT clawing at me, whispering in my ear, crawling up my spine. Telling me that I’ll never make it, I’ll never finish a whole novel, that I don’t know the first thing about writing poetry. Writing play scripts was relatively easy for me. After all I had been in theatre reading scripts for over thirty years. And the stories simply fell out of the sky and into my brain when writing a script.
But other genre?
When I could no longer resist the urgency of writing about the women who wait outside prison walls, I researched the length of the average novel; number of pages and words. Yikes! Over 300 pages and 70,000 words. DOUBT was screaming in my ear: ‘you’ll never be able to write that many pages.’ ‘you’re a playwright; not a novelist’, ‘who do you think you’re kidding?’ But I had a true story (several of them, in fact) and all I needed to do was flesh those stories out. Write one page at a time…or even one word.
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A few BOOKS BY TRISHA SUGAREK
When publishers turn down one of my books, I immediately self-publish it! After all, the publisher is not basing their decision on whether it is a well-written story and whether people should read it. They are basing their decision on whether it will make any money for the publisher. I can’t really fault them for that…they are, after all, in business.
I just finished reading a good story with interesting characters. The story plot was strong. Unfortunately, the author “furrowed” the brow of many, if not all, the characters. This word, used repeatedly, finally became an inevitable distraction. It’s okay for a writer to furrow a brow occasionally but mix it up. There are many synonyms: wrinkled, creased, crumpled, lined, wrinkly, rutted, crinkly, puckered, crinkled, rumpled, crushed. 
