Fighting the Inner Critic

My inner critic has multiple personality disorder. I’ve slowly been learning to deal with the louder, more obnoxious manifestations. The one that screams, “You Suck!” now gets the deflating, “It’s OK if I suck.” My belief in that statement is real and shuts him right up. The career-related taunts no longer get to me either. I’ve successfully transitioned from trying to be a success to trying to define my own place and writing persona.

So with the load-mouths silenced, what’s the problem? The problem is the sneaky little passive-aggressive voices that have taken me a long time to even associate with my inner critic. The lazy voices that don’t show themselves, sitting in the dark, staying under the radar and whispering dead-end detours to my subconscious.

The problem, I have finally realized, is the perceived failure of my two previous writing projects. What brought me to this realization was the decision to submit my first novel to agents. This action broke the spell. Of course, by failure I don’t mean the finished products themselves or their lack of sales. Both my novel and my book of short stories are as good as they could have been. My failure was a lack of confidence which prevented me from marketing them as aggressively as I could have. The relative success of this marketing is irrelevant, but if I don’t give it my all I’ll never get the closure which will allow me to move on to the next novel.

So the new novel gets put on hold again while I clean up some old business. I wonder what manifestation the inner critic will be forced to try next.