How to deal with uncertainty
Uncertainty about your writing, about your career, about your life is a common trouble in the realm of writers. At least it is in mine, and I’d like to believe that I’m not alone. Every time one might sit down to write, the body gets wracked with this fear — and it is a fear — that can make anyone shrivel up.
The pandemic has kind of shown us what it means to flirt with uncertainty. Every new wave, every new variant brought back that sense of foreboding and worry. Leaving us wondering about ‘what next?’
And if you break it down, uncertainty is nothing but the fear of the unknown. Technically, almost every fear could be whittled down to a fear of the unknown. If you’re afraid of the open water, it’s because you don’t know what might be lurking below. But when you’re feeling the heaviness of uncertainty, it’s because you don’t know what’s going to happen next, what is yet to come. And boy, can that be frustrating.
What goes through the writer’s mind?
We all deal with some form of uncertainty, be it in relationships, careers, health, whatever. But this is something almost every artist deals with, every time they pick up their tool of choice.
- Am I good enough
- Is my writing adequate
- Will anyone like it
- Have I missed any grammatical errors
- Will people like it
- Are these characters believable
- Is this line structure correct
- What line should follow the first
- Does this headline work
- Will anyone ever like it?
Sitting in your imaginary silo, wondering what words need to be strung together can torment you and fill you with a sense of dread. Enough to make you think a hundred times before you sit back down to write again.
How to deal with it?
If you take care of your anxiety, this uncertainty could go away. Anxiety can rear its ugly head in weird ways and weird situations. That sense of not knowing what’s to come can leave you with clenched jaws and white knuckles. We build scenarios in our head, playing them all out, choosing to linger on the negative ones.
If you’re writing an article, this anxiety can force you to question every step. Your head will slowly drift away into the world of ‘what ifs’. Before you’ve even finished writing, you’ll start playing out the consequences of hitting that publish button.
You might build extremely positive outcomes and extreme negative ones. Your expectations will build and so will the potential failures, leaving you lost in a swirl of thought, unable to actually finish the writing at hand.
And the biggest issue is that you’ll allow it to influence your current writing. So what can you do?
- Meditate — Probably the toughest thing to do, but the most beneficial. There are way too many benefits of meditation which have been extolled countless times online. It can act as a great reset for your mind. But it’s the one thing most people can’t find time for, me included.
- ‘Be in the moment’ — This is the most clichéd and bastardised line available on the internet. But what it means as a writer is to remove the future outcomes and the past mistakes from your current writing. If it’s your first draft, this is especially important. Don’t start editing or even thinking about it. Just get it all out of your system right now. Worry about the next step when you get to it.
A major reason for why we feel disturbed in an uncertain moment is that we’re feeding ourselves too much information. Videos, articles, podcasts, music, anything to feed the insatiable beast. When was the last time you did a digital detox? Just sat and removed the noise? I realised that I listened to music to calm myself down, but after a while it would simply become another disturbance for my thoughts.
- Disconnect — Just keep all the devices away and put them on flight mode. If you can afford an extra one, get a laptop that is air gapped. Find ways to remove all your devices when you’re trying to create something. Staring at a screen has become a drug to lean on when you’re unsure about what to do. You could be writing, but you’d rather open another YouTube video. You could be sitting in a restaurant taking in the surroundings, but you’d rather stare at a phone while your friends get there. It’s a crutch that is a blessing and a hindrance.
This is where your distractions can lead to a sense of procrastination. And with that comes the guilt. The heavy, heavy guilt that weighs on every step you take. Eventually it becomes the only thing you know and thus creates an endless cycle. You’ll find more distractions and reasons to procrastinate.
- Find solace in the process — Be it an article or a novel, both can feel like gigantic monoliths looming in front of you, ready to crash down onto your hopes and dreams. An article can sometimes feel like an endless effort. It doesn’t matter if it takes someone else five minutes to do, it’s how you feel about it. Because you’re the one who’s doing it. But what if you broke it down? What if it wasn’t a monolith, but a bunch of smaller Lego pieces?
Why does a book have chapters? It’s to give the reader a break and to help with the flow of things. Why not consider your process in a similar manner? Break it up into smaller pieces and make it iterative. Every step you take then becomes a learning experience. The people who tried to get humans to the moon didn’t build the rocket ship directly. They broke it down into pieces and built a process to achieve it. Look at everything as a process and try finding joy in the smaller components of it, not the larger finished product. Because that will come either way.
The one thing you’ll always notice is that once you’re past that stage of uncertainty, you’ll look back and wonder why you felt that way in the first place. You might be uncertain about an article, but once you hit publish you’re in a weird glow, confused as to why you made such a big deal about it initially. So it really becomes a matter on confidence. That’s the reason why most seasoned writers will keep telling you to write every day, just to get over your uncertainty and doubt.
- Break the echo chamber — A writer’s life is a lonely one. You might have collaborators, but for the most of it, you’re sitting and trying to get words out of your head. This is when the questions and doubts start bouncing around the walls in your head, increasing the din. How are you supposed to write through that?
Ask for help from people who might’ve gone through the same, maybe a writing coach.
Join a writing community and share your fears. Learn from the collective experience and understand that you aren’t alone in your uncertainty and fears.
Talk about your vulnerabilities and invite people in. This can be a liberating experience, but ironically needs you to get over your uncertainty about sharing in the first place.
Try a writing course that connects you with likeminded people who are also trying to learn.
We all deal with uncertainty in our own ways, because we all have our own approach to things. That’s what makes us unique in our writing and creation. I think my biggest takeaway from trying to be a digital nomad in a pandemic is to deal with the uncertainty in any manner possible. Just find a hack that gets you to the other side, because that’s all you need to do. Every time you feel the hesitation creeping up, figure out any method to get past it. Because once you’re through, it’s all done.
