The Valley of Despair
You'll find myself and many other writers comfortably camped out here.
If you’re a writer, maybe you’ve experienced this feeling. Perhaps there’s an author you really admire and look up to. It could be Donna Tartt, or Cormac McCarthy. Or perhaps it’s Oscar Wilde or Jane Austen. Your love for their writing is so visceral that every time you read their work your heart both sings and breaks at the same time. As much as you adore their work, you ache in equal measure that you’ll never be able to produce prose anywhere as good.
The more you write, the worse you feel.
Instead of gaining confidence in your work, you sink further and further into despair because no matter how hard you try, you just don’t measure up. The gap between where you are and where you want to be grows ever wider until it feels completely overwhelming and impassable.
Lauren Groff is one of my all time favourite authors. I devour her books every time I get my hands on them. Groff is magical and lyrical in her prose. Her books spellbind me into losing all sense of time and space. She is at a level which I can only dream of achieving as a writer, and likely never will.
The knowledge of my lack of skill is paralysing.
How could there possibly be space in the writing world for novices like me to exist next to legends like Groff?
This, my friends, is the Dunning-Kruger Effect… A phenomena I’m all too familiar with.
Very Well Mind explains the Dunning-Kruger Effect:
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they are. Essentially, low-ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their capabilities.
The term lends a scientific name and explanation to a problem that many people immediately recognize—that fools are blind to their own foolishness. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, "Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge."
The study, conducted in 1999 by Justin Kruger and David Dunning revealed that:
People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.
Paradoxically, improving the skills of the participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect can be broken down into four stages:
The peak of “Mount Stupid”
Or: Unconscious incompetence. This is where you are most ignorant of your limitations and lack of competence. You’re often overconfident in your abilities.
The Valley of Despair
Or: Conscious incompetence. You’re now aware of how little you know and how far you have to go to get to actual competence. Your confidence plummets and you feel overwhelmed by the journey ahead.
The Slope of Enlightenment
Or: Conscious Competence. You accept there are things you don’t know, and start to learn more and develop your skills. You start to get the hang of it.
Plateau of Sustainability
Or: Unconscious competence. You’ve mastered the skills and don’t even have to think about doing it, but you know how much work was required to get here.
Right now, I am entrenched in the Valley of Despair. I’ve made a nice little home for myself here. I’ve hung pictures on the walls and bought a pretty rug for the lounge. I am thoroughly settled in and showing no signs of upping sticks and moving any time soon.
There must be a way out, surely? Otherwise we’d never have masterpieces like The Secret History or The Book Thief.
Maybe Donna Tartt spent 9 years writing her debut novel because it took her 7 to leave the Valley of Despair?
We know there’s hope, because what comes after the Valley of Despair is the Slope of Enlightenment.
But how do we (I) get there?
What is step one?
According to Mr Kruger and Mr Dunning, we approach enlightenment when we begin to hone our skills. You could go back to university and get an MFA in creative writing. Or you could challenge yourself at home with a few writing exercises. Some of these are tried and true practises among writers. Others are inspired by authors I admire. At the very least, these exercises help me to focus on something other than how bad I am and sometimes, that’s enough.
Morning Pages
Before you roll your eyes and click away, this is an age-old practice that many writers across genres swear by. I myself have come and gone from Morning Pages over the years. The idea is to start every morning, first thing before you check your phone or even have a cup of coffee with three pages of a handwritten stream of consciousness.
Ideally writing on A4 pages, once you’ve completed three full pages you’re free to carry on with your day.
There are no rules about what you can write. No one ever needs to see or read it. You can simply write “I don’t know what to write” over and over for three pages if you want. But by the end of the third page, most people have uncovered some block or worked through some anxieties and feel unburdened to continue their day.
Transcribe your favourite author’s writing
The writers you love and can’t get enough of? By transcribing passages from their works it can help you get a real feel for how they write and the stylistic decisions they make. If you aspire to write more like Stephen King, by embodying his writing style, perhaps you’ll come to understand how he strings each sentence together.
If nothing else, it’ll help you gain a deeper appreciation for a book or passage you love.
Rewrite a passage from a different character’s perspective
You could do this using your own work, or using a passage from an author you love. A change in narrative voice might also help to shift things if they’re feeling stuck or stale. Or in my case where I’m a novice to fiction, help me develop different perspectives and a unique tone of voice for different characters.
Or, this could just be for fun. You choose.
Observe and write about a moment in your day
Margaret Atwood recommends aspiring writers practise observing everyday moments and occurrences. Perhaps it’s noticing and describing the tree outside your house. Perhaps it’s a bird twittering along the fence. It could be an interaction between two strangers in the coffee shop, or the cracks in the pavement as you walk to work.
The goal is to learn to identify and translate the fine details of life that help to add richness and layers to your story.
Ultimately, as painful as it feels in the moment, being aware of your limitations is actually a good thing. It shows you have discerning taste. Ira Glass has an impactful take on this called The Gap. He says that there should always be a gap between your current abilities and your taste. If that gap closes, it means you’ve stopped progressing and growing. Ideally, there will always be a gap.
Right now, as I settle in for another night in the Valley of Despair, I’m going to focus only on the small tasks that do not come with the same weight of expectation that tackling a full novel carries. Small, daily steps towards becoming a better writer, even if it’s just reading excellent writing that excites and inspires me.
When I first started writing on Substack in early May, I hit “publish” with gay abandon on any and all random streams of consciousness that poured out of my brain and onto the page. Even then I knew, to some degree, that what mattered most was getting started and that the more I wrote, the better I would get.
As I look back now, I can see so clearly that I was camped out on Mount Stupid.
Those posts are so, so bad.
I mean, SO bad.
Where did I get off thinking anyone would read that rubbish, let alone care?
Today, I want to delete them all. But I don’t, because I believe that the glaring mediocrity of that work is a powerful reminder of how far I’ve come. I hope that others might see it that way too.
In any case, I’ll keep showing up no matter how far I’ve got to go because the only way to get better and reach the Plateau of Sustainability is to keep writing.
I typically go fishing in the valley of despair. Great place to write.