Talk for Hampshire Writers, 13th January 2026.
By Vanessa Gebbie.
This talk followed a fascinating illustrated discourse by Martin White about the unfortunate and unfair portrayal of characters with albinism in literature and film.
I started by congratulating Martin on his great talk – which I found hugely important. My self-doubt inner voice was saying, “Follow that, if you can…”
But my inner voice of self-confidence was also saying, “Don’t compare yourself with any other writer. Do what you do, as well as you can. “
I think I’ll stick with that.
We started with a game of Word Cricket – which lasts about 10 minutes. Follow the link for details of the game – perhaps the most important thing to note here, is that those writers present were told there would be absolutely no reading out after the game had finished. No sharing of their responses.
After the game was up, and after I had given participants a minute or so to stop what they were writing, I asked for some feedback, specifically wondering how it felt to write like that. Writers were generous with their comments, including observations that it was exciting, surprising, freeing – and slightly worrying for a few as they didn’t know what was going to happen next – but the overall consensus was that it had had a very positive effect on their creativity.
They knew their writing was not going to be judged – so any apprehension about failing was scotched from the start. Perhaps any self doubt was silenced in some measure?
I then moved into the talk itself. As follows:
Some time back I was at Small Wonder Festival at Charleston, near my home, in Sussex. It was not long after my novel The Coward’s Tale was published and I was in excellent company – the prolific and experienced novelist Maggie Gee who had mentored me thanks to The Arts Council for the final year of edits, and her husband – broadcaster and Faber author Nicholas Rankin. Maggie was the first female chair of the council of the Royal Society of Literature. Nicholas Rankin’s next book, the excitedly awaited Churchill’s Wizards – about The British Genius for Deception in both World Wars – was due to be published. We were sitting in the old barn at Charleston, on squashy sofas, near the tea table. Nicholas was very very quiet. That worried me – but Maggie said- ‘Oh don’t mind him, he’s always like this before a new book comes out.’ Then she added, ‘And I’m the same.’
I was amazed. These two were among the most steady and well respected of British authors, and yet they both had a crisis of confidence before a new book came out? Oh, sure, I’d been a gibbering wreck before The Coward’s Tale came out – but it was my first novel. I was allowed to be jittery. I’d expected seasoned writers to be more secure than that.
Far from it. These two had these recurring self-doubt episodes – but interestingly and importantly, they were able to pick themselves up and start again on the next project. How? What was going on? I knew that Maggie allowed herself a good length of time before embarking on the next big thing. Maybe this mystery was something to do with time?
A few years before that, as a very new writer, I’d been working in the company of a very dedicated and focussed writing group, led by another experienced, well published and equally dedicated writer and tutor. Part of the attraction to this raw newbie was the enormous confidence this tutor offered. Hard work would definitely pay off, they said, if you followed their specific system. Sure enough, it worked for me as some of us started producing short work which was good enough to get published online, occasionally in print, and to be shortlisted or placed in small competitions. Sounds great – but looking back, I had never asked myself two questions.
First, might this have happened anyway with hard work, and no ‘system’??
Second – what about the others, successes or not? For some writers there, the system became destructive, as it wasn’t their natural way of creating, and they stopped writing. Their own confidence had taken a hard knock. Self-doubt had won the day, sadly. The quiet voice of self confidence was shouted down.
When looking for quotes to illustrate this talk I stumbled on so many websites with advice on how to boost your self-confidence as a writer – aimed particularly at woman writers. But reading much of it, I felt some was little more than a bleat about how the terrible world out there shatters our confidence – not forgetting the terrible world in here. (I tapped my forehead – ‘’in here” equals inside our own heads!) In writing talks. Workshops. How they weren’t given nice, gentle feedback, and it ruined their lives. One of these advice-givers was a woman who had had some rigorous but tough honest feedback in her 20s, at a US University writing course. And she didn’t write after that for thirty years. Echoes of my own writing group referred to above.
That was so sad. I was and am asking myself, where was everyone’s little voice of self-confidence, pushing the ‘wronged’ to either walk away, or fight back?
My own experience outlined above was not all bad. Even though this was over twenty years ago, I learned a lot from that writer – not only about their interpretation of the craft and process of writing which happened to mostly chime with me and my own processes, but also how to analyse my own drafts and those of others, for flaws. I learned too, that if I wanted to support, teach or mentor other writers, that far from touting one system that might work for me, that immense care and sensitivity is needed to understand and work with an individual’s own creative processes.
I’m sure we have all been in courses or workshops where a very confident teacher tells us theirs is the best, perhaps only way to do it. Because it has worked for them. Or we’ve experienced the writer with the loudest voice in a writing group holding too much power. As I did. Whereas actually, I suspect you know this – there are many many different ways to do this thing we love. You have your own way – I have mine – and sure, there are guidelines to sometimes understand and respect – but rigid rules, no. One way to do this? No, absolutely not.
This tutor had rules, and actually I tip my hat as they all made their way into The Coward’s Tale – in broken form – and I thoroughly enjoyed being wicked enough to break them with impunity. A few examples –
You should never start anything with unattributed dialogue. So – the book begins with a line of unattributed dialogue.
Never start anything with comments on the weather. “It was a dark and stormy night…!!” Every single chapter begins with a description of the wind blowing through a south Wales Valley’s town.
Well – Bloomsbury liked it – but hang on – what happened to me – the shivering wreck who would wake at three in the morning, to check the twelve characters, to recheck them, to run through each character’s narrative arc, to worry about their backstories, have I forgotten something important?
Somehow I knew that for all that, all my “3 in the morning” self doubt, I could also listen to my own inner quiet voice of confidence. Sometimes, I was totally secure in what I was doing – no worries at all.
Here’s a quote from poet Charles Bukowski:
Bad writers tend to have self-confidence, while the good ones tend to have self-doubt.
I must say, I don’t entirely agree, do you? Isn’t it more nuanced than that?
I found this on Joanna Penn’s blog: (The Creative Penn)
“Even famous writers suffer from self-doubt…”
One year, (she says) I went to ThrillerFest in New York, which is the conference run by International Thriller Writers. Some of the biggest names in the world speak there.
I went to one panel with authors like Lee Child, he writes the Jack Reacher books, and Sandra Brown, who’s one of the biggest romantic suspense authors, Clive Cussler, who writes action/adventure. Huge names in the thriller industry.
R.L. Stine was there; he’s one of the most famous children’s writers, in fact, the most prolific children’s author in the world. He writes the Goosebumps series. These authors have been writing books for years.
in the Q and A A writer in the audience stood up and said, “My manuscript is terrible. I feel like I need to give up.”
And all of the writers on that panel went down the line, and they all said, ‘But I still feel that way’.”
The point is – these were all hugely successful writers, selling in the millions – so maybe they actually NEEDED that self doubt to be successful?
Maybe self-doubt is not always our enemy then, any more than self-confidence is always a friend.
A lightbulb moment came for me at Bridport Festival some years back, when I heard Ali Smith and Jackie Kay talk. They were discussing their writing processes, and at some point said something that chimed superbly with this topic:
“A Writer Needs Self Belief and Self Doubt in Equal Measure.”
They said doubt and confidence need to work together. And they were not just talking about/to learner writers.
I’ve been at this writing game for almost twenty years now, won some prizes, had a range of books published, been commissioned to curate a creative writing text book that’s on recommended reading lists for courses in the UK and beyond. And yet, I still doubt myself. Of course I do. It’s normal.
If you, newer writers, are waiting for those feelings to disappear when you get published, and you will … I have to disappoint you. It doesn’t get any easier, the further you go. If anything, it gets more difficult.
But – I’m arguing (in case you missed it!) that that’s a good thing.
I fully expect you to be shaking your heads by now. So – let me give you an example of useful self doubt and confidence straight from the horse’s mouth. Telling it as it is. This particular horse is called Roger Morris, writing as R N Morris, whose fourth novel ‘A Razor Wrapped in Silk’ came out with Faber well over ten years ago… He wrote this at the time:
The unbearable weirdness of being published.
I’ve got a book coming out on Thursday. My fourth published novel. You’d think by now I’d be used to the experience but I’m not. I get incredibly apprehensive ahead of the publication date. My overriding instinct is to run and hide. I find the mental image of myself with a blanket over my head strangely comforting. And yet, at the same time, I feel as though I should be doing everything I can to tell people about the event. So every now and then I scribble notes under my blanket and hold them out to whoever happens to be passing.
I veer between being worried that newspapers will ignore it, and I won’t get a single review, and terrified that it will be universally and humiliatingly panned. It never occurs to me that people might like it.
But he carries on regardless.
And what truly characterises my feelings about the fact of publication the thing that I really can’t get over, is sheer incredulity that it is happening at all.
R N Morris has now published many more novels. I asked him, via Twitter (X) how he feels now. No change, he said. He’s successful. Has been for over a decade. I’m arguing he is successful BECAUSE he sometimes feels like this. And also because he is confident enough in his own creative abilities!
This is what my own experience tells me, over and over:
If we think we are just marvellous, we put a stop on our learning. If we just doubt, we don’t fight for anything. It’s that swing between doubt and confidence that enriches and drives us forward.
Quote: The writer who loses his self doubt should stop writing immediately. Sidonie Gabrielle
When you decide to join a writing course, or even come to this talk, you are arguably confident that you might find out things to help you with your writing You are confident that this might be useful, that you CAN do it, that what you learn from reading, from tutors, some peers will lead you a step closer to something called ‘writing well’ – whatever you mean by that.
And crucially, you have enough self doubt to know you don’t know it all. You need to learn.
It is already working for you, this pull between the two. You are already reacting to them both, letting the tension between the two pull you forward. Even if, like me, it is easier to recognise the self doubt some of the time.
….
We’ve looked hard at untrammelled self doubt. But what of its oppo, over-self-confidence? We all know it when we see it in others, and can’t it be a pain sometimes? The writer who sits smugly in the corner away from the group, smiling quietly to themselves. They’ve cracked it. THIS is how it’s done. Best not share it too much in case it gets watered down.
I see it often, when I am working with the writers on online courses and residentials. I see plenty of tentative newer writers asking the rest questions and apologising for time wasting. (They never are!) And I see now and again the equally new writer who jumps in to answer the questions, with no caveats – with absolute certainty, that the way they do this thing is THE way. Do what I say and you’ll be fine. (Look them up, thanks Mr Google – and you find that far from having a string of publications behind them to prove their theories are helpful… they have… not one. Its all hot air. ) This is unhelpful and untempered self-confidence. Unhelpful to others, and ultimately to themselves.
I’d argue this is surface stuff, seeking positive strokes and ‘likes’. The confidence I am looking for, for us for is something else, something that comes from inside us, as creatives. That little voice. We need to recognise it, nurture it and listen to it when it speaks to us.
We’ve all felt it. Sometimes, it’s like this – a feeling you begin to recognise which wraps your creative spirit in warmth even when you’ve been told by someone who is supposed to know, that you’ve got it wrong. When the work you handed in comes back with ‘less than’ good marks, but something inside you says, “but hang on…” or when your writing group responds negatively to something you’ve written, and you suspect that some of them just don’t get it. Of course, they might be right, and you must explore why they are reacting like this – but please believe me – they MAY all be wrong.
What is real self-confidence in this writing stuff we do? I think it covers a lot, but mainly, isn’t it the knowledge that everything we write – and I mean EVERYTHING – is useful. Better than useful. You had a right to write it. To allow that to arrive, we need the confidence not to follow the herd. Not to make pastiches, but rather to create something different, in the real belief that our creation is just as valuable and may be more so, that what is already out there.
OK, it may not be ‘good’ yet in literary terms, But it has been born. It deserves respect from us, time, attention, before we can start to edit.
And so what if those creations don’t ‘make it’ – whatever that means? Haven’t you learned something in the making of them? You’re not the same person who began the project. You’ve grown.
Here’s a tale of creative self-confidence. I learned a huge lesson ages back from a CD I bought over twenty years ago on a long car journey, at a service station. It was audio of Fawlty Towers episodes, narrated by the late lamented Andrew Sachs, who played Manuel to John Cleese’s Basil Fawlty. It wasn’t so much what he recreated, however. It was the clips between the episodes – Cleese himself recalling how he’d written the episodes, with his wife Connie Booth. I remember him describing days of writing, and then evenings of more writing over bottles of wine, where the scripts would flow so easily. How they fell into bed exhausted, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow, after their heads had cleared, they’d start again.
Until one morning, the spark had gone.
Nothing. Cleese was in such a panic, he rang one of the Monty Python team, to ask their advice. ‘Don’t worry,’ he was told. ‘Trust your creativity. It’s having a break.’
And it was. A couple of days later, the words flowed again. Ever since, when he hasn’t been able to write something, he’s trusted that it would come back.
Much later, I met the writer Andrew Miller, whose first novel ‘Ingenious Pain’ won three awards. He said exactly the same thing. Trust the Process, is how he put it.
I’d put it like this; TRUST YOUR PROCESS.
One quote to remember:
‘It is IMPOSSIBLE to discourage the real writer. They don’t give a damn what you say, they are going to write.’ Sinclair Lewis.
Doubt is a friend. As is confidence. Listen to them both. Tune in. But, like all friends, please don’t let either one take over.
