The reason I was playing Subnautica this weekend (besides working a half-day on Saturday and being all tired at the end of it) was that, once again, I was feeling this ugly combination of inadequacy and embarrassment about putting my writing -- my fiction -- in front of people.
Fanfiction doesn't carry this. Maybe because it is more of a closed community, so you are sharing with people who are in the same boat as you. Put your work on Amazon or between covers and you are making a statement to the world that "This is a Real Book."
It isn't just writing from the POV of a female protagonist (although this is part of it -- and you bet I run scenes past my favorite sister when I wonder how they are going to come across). And not just feeling like an impostor at playing at being a writer.
No, this goes all the way to feeling like being an impostor at being human. We all go through this. There's a particular version that strikes in young adulthood, where you have a job and a car and you don't feel like an actual adult. Age imposes another one, where you start to feel like a gawky teen that for some weird reason now looks like an old man.
I'm possibly spectrum. I have focus issues, and I'm poorly socialized. I can use the former, but stories are generally about people in society. There are expectations, especially in genre fiction, that the general experience of workmates and romances, friends and relations, is going to exist in some recognizable form in that universe. Just like clothes and food and other things that are so basic that only the oddest stories change them up.
Well, fortunately I have a solution. All I have to do is get to the page. A method a number of writers use to ease into a writing session is to start back a couple scenes. Review what you wrote last so you sort of remember what you were doing in plot and in style. Fix a couple of obvious mistakes. Maybe tighten up a sentence or two. And, oh, looks like you've started writing...
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