Overcoming an author’s self-doubt

Teale is not the only one who experienced a dose of self-doubt in the writing of  “Shades of Teale” – I suffered too!

I began writing “Shades of Teale” in 1998 while I was pregnant with my second child and it was a very romantic beginning for a novel. I was living at the time with my husband, 11-year-old daughter, and two large dogs in a beautiful beachfront house in Port Stanley, Ontario. My husband and I fell asleep every night listening to the soothing sounds of waves lapping against the shoreline and we awoke every morning to the sun glinting into our bedroom window as it rose.

After putting my daughter on the bus to get to school every morning, I would take my dogs out onto the beach and amble up and down breathing in the fish-tanged scent of the air and delighting in the treasures the waves had brought in overnight. It was heavenly!

In due course, I would return home and retreat to my second floor writing room and get to work. I was a freelance corporate communications copywriter then as now, but I had managed to organize my workload around a niggling desire to write a novel. I had my husband’s full support.

After 10 years of struggling to balance work and family, care-giving and business writing, I was losing faith. Who was I to think I could become a novelist? Who was I to attempt to make this dream come true? The positive energy that had accompanied my first hopeful crack at a novel had evaporated. This was never going to work.

Not every writer has quite as much disruption as I have enjoyed in life but I’ve certainly heard others talk about how hard it is to stay focused long enough to complete a manuscript, and harder still to bring the project to publication. When I began writing “Shades of Teale” I truly believed I would have a first draft finished by the time my baby was born and that I would have a finished manuscript within a year. In actual fact, I held the first copy of my novel in my hands a little more than 13 years after I typed the first sentence. The secret to success? I simply didn’t give up.

I may not live on a beach anymore but I have a vibrant life and plenty more dreams for the future. My novel lives! If you’re in that situation today, I totally get that self-doubt piece. But stick with it! If I can do it, you can too!

Have a comment? I’d love to hear your thoughts!