Like a lot of writers and other artists, I deal with imposter syndrome, and not the kind where I toss little colorful astronauts out of airlocks. I have this spark of hope that maybe, actually, I’m not bad at creating stuff, but I also have a black hole of dread and shame and fear of rejection that swallows the spark faster than a puppy snarfing up food dropped on the floor. Every success is a fluke, every compliment is a lie, and anyone who is fooled into thinking anything positive about me or my work will soon realize they’ve been duped*.

One of the techniques used in The Artist’s Way to help people deal with these, to use an extremely scientific term, “badfeels,” is creative affirmations. The actual list in the book is strongly spiritual—”I am a channel for God’s creativity,” “My dreams come from God,” and so on—but more generally the text explores the idea of replacing negative beliefs and self-talk with positive statements. These can be things like “I deserve love” or “I deserve fair pay” or “I deserve a rewarding creative life,” but they can also be compliments like “I am a brilliant and successful artist” or “I have rich creative talents.”

When our brains object to these statements, we’re supposed to write down those objections and try to figure out where they came from. Who hurt us? Who made us doubt ourselves? Who told us the mean things that we’re now repeating back to ourselves? That exploration is meant to be cleansing, an emotional enema that will then allow us to believe in the affirmations instead of rejecting them.

For some people, this absolutely works. I wish I was one of them.

For me, affirmations are lies I’m trying to tell myself. No amount of external assurance or internal arguing will get rid of this conviction. If you tied me to a chair and clamped my eyelids open and forced me to watch video after video brainwashing me into believing “I have rich creative talents,” I can assure you, my droogs, I would go full Clockwork Orange on myself within days.

It comes back to trust. I already struggle to trust myself, so telling me I have to convince myself of things I believe to be untrue simply reinforces that I am not to be trusted. It’s the emotional equivalent of pulling myself up by my bootstraps; it can’t be done, and it ends in frustration and pain.

It also becomes a vicious cycle. I try to tell myself a positive thing; I reject it as a lie that I’m just telling myself so I’ll feel better; I lose trust in myself because I know I’m lying to myself, making me a lying liar who lies; future attempts to tell myself positive things are rejected even harder. All I’m doing is eroding any trust in myself, and that erosion spreads from my creative endeavors to all aspects of my life and thoughts and feelings. If I’ll lie to myself about this, what else?

I don’t spend all my time wallowing in a pit of despair—not about this, anyway—so clearly I have developed coping strategies that allow me to get my work done. Maybe they’ll work for you, too.

The thing I do most frequently evolved from a technique I learned from a meditation app: noting. It goes like this: I have dark thoughts about myself, my writing, my career, whatever. I have to get stuff done in spite of the thoughts. I note that I’m having those thoughts, the same way I’d note the weather outside my house. “Look, it’s raining.” “Look, there are those ‘my writing sucks and I’ll never amount to anything’ thoughts again.”

I don’t force myself to ignore the thoughts, because that actually ends up paradoxically putting more focus on them and thus they stick around longer—it’s like yelling “I’m not looking at you!” at the rain, which, to do that, you’re kind of definitely looking at it, aren’t you? Or at least covering your eyes and thinking about how you’re not looking at it, no sir. And arguing with them? Same deal: then I’m having unpleasant conversations with the voices in my head, and I really would rather be writing, or cleaning my bathroom, or doing almost anything else that is either more productive or relaxing.

Instead, I try to shift my attention to the thing I’m supposed to be doing, even though those thoughts are still there, the same way I’d look away from the window as it’s raining outside. The rain hasn’t stopped, I’m not ignoring it per se, it’s just there but I’m not staring at it. I’m starting a sprint timer, possibly in a Discord with other people or while watching a Twitch stream, and I’m getting back to work.

You may have seen a comic at some point, of someone yelling “I don’t like thing” and then the clouds part and an angel descends from heaven and hands them a piece of paper, upon which is written, simply, “ok” in block print. Noting is basically me, the angel, handing my moody brain that piece of paper and then returning to heaven to get back to my angel duties. The yelling person isn’t gone, but I’m not standing there letting them continue to yell at me. I acknowledge them, and I move on.

It took a lot of practice to get this technique to work consistently, but it’s been way more successful for me than affirmations because I’m not actually telling myself anything. I’m not trying to force my thoughts to be positive, or convince myself that my badfeels are wrong. All I’m doing is… working anyway.

Is it spite? I don’t feel spiteful, but maybe it’s a little bit that. I think, weirdly, it’s more similar to defeatism, or perhaps acceptance. Maybe I can’t stop that mean little voice, but I can put my headphones on, crank up the lo-fi beats, and let it fade to background noise.

Sometimes, going back to The Artist’s Way methods, sharing the badfeels with friends can also help me move past them. I can say, “I’m feeling like crap today in this specific way, I know it will pass, but I had to get it out.” And they’ll remind me that, yes, it will pass, just like the weather does, eventually. And even if it doesn’t, I can grab an umbrella or a raincoat and go get the groceries anyway.

Okay, this analogy is getting away from me, but you see what I mean.

Can “writer lies” ever work? For some people, absolutely. And some ways of constructing them may succeed better than others.

A friend of mine (AJ Hackwith) coined that term, specifically, for the “lies” we tell ourselves to be able to get our writing done. They can be things like, “I’m going to pretend I’m writing a fanfic of my own story,” or “I’m only going to write two sentences and then stop.” These may not even be lies, technically speaking; maybe you ARE going to treat your story like it’s a fanfic, or you’ll stop after two sentences instead of getting hyped enough to continue. Part of what makes the assertions work is that seed of truth or possibility.

Which leads to the next note, which I got from someone (Susan Alia) on Bluesky: sometimes an affirmation can work if it’s built on something you know to be true. One example that I’ve deployed, to mixed success—because, again, affirmations are not For Me as a rule—is, “You’ve done this before and you can do it again.” I tend to use it when I’m having, perhaps not writer’s block exactly, but writer’s inertia, where I can’t make myself start working out of fear that the writing will be bad.

The first half of that affirmation is demonstrably true; I have written many things! There’s a whole page on my website dedicated to the ones that have been published. It then stands to reason, even if it’s not certain, that the second half of the affirmation COULD be true, that the odds of it being true are good enough that if I get back to work, maybe I can MAKE it be true.

Ultimately, that’s what this all comes down to: building our truths, and weathering our storms. You may not be able to shut down intrusive thoughts, but you also don’t have to stop what you’re doing and give them your attention. You may not be able to chant the rain away, but you can close the curtains, make some tea, take your meds, and let the clouds do their thing while you do yours**.

*As a side note, a thing one of my therapists mentioned regarding compliments: if I reject a compliment that someone gives me, I am effectively calling that person a liar. Am I actually going to sit here and consider all my friends and all the fans of my work to be liars? Or fools that I’ve somehow tricked into liking me or my art? Of course not! That’s really messed up! Thinking about my imposter syndrome this way helps me get past it when it flares up, because I am highly susceptible to guilt even if logic doesn’t always work.

**People who are in a crisis situation should not be reading this and going, “But I am stuck outside in the rain and I have no way to get dry, so this makes no sense!” Or rather, yes, that’s the natural response, because if you’re in a crisis situation then the first thing you need to worry about is finding a way to get out of the crisis. This is not an essay for people who need solutions to extremely serious life problems; this is not a “this, too, shall pass” or “just keep swimming” or “stay positive” kind of reply to hardship. You can’t bootstrap your way out of poverty or war or political turmoil or illness. Anyone who pretends there are easy solutions to complex problems is probably trying to sell you something.

For those who aren’t familiar with it, The Artist’s Way is a book by Julia Cameron that has been around for decades, and that a lot of folks have used successfully to get themselves unstuck when their creativity has been blocked somehow. It’s a 12-week program, with each week focusing on “recovering” a different element of creativity, and a few specific techniques maintained throughout.

I’m not writing this to criticize the book or warn anyone away from it; it’s a tool that has worked for a lot of people, and I’m all for trying tools to see whether they work for you*. But I am one of the people for whom this tool did not work, and I know others who had similar experiences, so I’ve been pondering the whys and wherefores of it for a while. I thought it might help to write them out, not just for my own personal understanding, but in case it’s useful to others who also struggled.

For a start, the spiritual/religious aspects of the book can be off-putting to some. Despite attempts to spin this as optional, discussions of God and the divine nature of the creative impulse are pervasive, arguably central to the core tenets of the process. The subtitle of the book is “A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity”; says it right there on the tin, so to speak. You can do some work to ignore this or scoot around it, but it is work to a certain extent. If this doesn’t bother you, it’s not a problem; if it does, you may bounce off this entirely from the beginning.

The second speed bump is one of the core techniques of The Artist’s Way: the daily pages. Every morning, you’re supposed to take a half hour to write, by hand in a notebook, three pages of something, anything, whatever you want. They don’t have to be good or make sense; they’re supposed to drain your brain of all the gunk that’s clogging your pipes, so to speak, so the creative waters can flow freely.

Unfortunately, for me, the pages drained… everything. By the time I’d finished them every day—it absolutely took me longer than a half hour to do—I was exhausted and I struggled to get my energy back. A process that was supposed to clear the old lotion from the bottle’s pump instead emptied the bottle completely.

For someone with limited time and emotional resources, being told to do a thing like this every single day? It’s incredibly demoralizing and a recipe for failure, guilt and shame. I persisted, hoping it would get easier, faster, that all my effort would be rewarded if I didn’t give up. Instead, it got worse. By the time I stopped, the only thing I was writing was the daily pages, which were mostly diaries of my own feelings of incompetence.

The first week’s goal is to recover one’s sense of safety**. The idea behind this is to find out what or who has stifled your creativity, to dig into your past and unearth the moments when you were put down or made to feel worthless, talentless, frivolous, and in doing so to free yourself from those burdens so you can feel safe to create again. Unfortunately, for me, the daily pages ended up being a big part of what was contributing to those negative emotions on an ongoing basis. They made me feel deeply insecure when they were supposed to do the opposite.

It took me weeks to quit and move on. One of the hardest things about any creative program or process is figuring out whether it’s genuinely not working for you, or whether you need to give it more time and effort. Habits can be onerous to implement. Practice makes progress, but benefits can be incremental or hard to perceive. The right way may not be the easy way, and we want easy. Why wouldn’t we? Who wants anything to be difficult?

There’s a boundary, though, where difficult becomes harmful. Instead of committing to a challenge that you’ll ultimately derive tangible benefits from, you’re hurting yourself and making things worse. To use an exercise comparison, you’re not strengthening your muscles, you’re damaging them, straining them. Recovering from that can not only put you right back where you started, it may also leave you worse off, in need of additional time and emotional energy to heal.

Again, this is not me criticizing the book so much as thinking about why it didn’t work for me. In doing so, I’m also considering alternate approaches that might be better for someone like me, and maybe someone like you, especially in these extremely trying times. I already have a few ideas! I’ll let you know what I come up with.

*Within reason. Sometimes we waste a lot of time searching for the One Tool that will solve all our problems, instead of using the tools we already have as best we can. This kind of Holy Grail quest can be self-defeating, hamster wheel spinning, yak shaving, cat waxing… whatever you want to call it.

**I’m confining myself to the notion of safety the book is addressing. I could write a whole separate essay on the many ways in which safety is an impossible goal for some people depending on a host of factors, and how artists often make art despite their circumstances, and how it frankly sucks and we shouldn’t glorify art created from pain, suffering and deprivation.

As I make my way through Mage You Look while also pondering side and future projects, and chat with all kinds of writers in various places about our respective processes, a thing I think about is seeing how people approach… I’ll call it rigidity vs. malleability.

For some writers, specific characters or world elements or plot points are fixed, immutable, and everything else must be built up around those things. They’re the foundations of the story house; they’re the seeds that grow into the story tree, or bush, or flower. Even if the furniture in the house moves around, or the bush gets trimmed into a topiary, those essential starter components don’t change, no matter how big or small they are.

For me, most things are negotiable. When I’m planning, I brainstorm and feel my way around, looking for shiny stuff like a corvid. And that stuff can be surprisingly vague: traits or themes rather than specific details. Archetypes or aesthetics. Vague plot shapes. I research and iterate. I fiddle and test. I make notes. I accrete. I roll around a katamari and see what sticks to it.

There comes a point for me where things do solidify, like I’ve finished my clay sculpture and I’ve fired it and now its form is set. Eventually the katamari is large enough to get yeeted into space and become a star. Except even then I may still make fundamental changes, beyond playing with the colors or extra decorations or whatever. There’s always room for that: the play, the tweaking and revision.

I think sometimes writers forget we control all the variables in a story. If something doesn’t make sense, we can rework it until it does. A character who wouldn’t make a choice in one scenario may do so if the conditions change, or if something in their back story shifts. A setting detail that doesn’t fit can be taken out or made to make sense. One plot point can be substituted for another.

Character, setting, plot, theme… they’re all up to the writer. They’re all the result of a series of choices. How you make those choices is up to you! But you have the power to control them, to set the parameters. And that power can be exercised at any time in the process.

Even after a thing is published and set in stone, there is still room to play. Things have to be internally consistent, logical, believable within the confines of what’s established. But within that framework, there are often ways to retcon, to reveal new layers that recontextualize the existing ones, to create ambiguity and uncertainty, add unreliable narration… There are many available tools to reshape or repaint or refine.

So I guess my bottom line is: embrace your process, but also internalize that you control your story. You can always add a room onto your house regardless of its foundation, or plant a vine to wrap around your tree. Take the reins! Embrace your agency! Revel in the act of creation! You’re the deity in this universe you’re crafting, and you can do anything you want with it.