Second Guessing Yourself

Constructing a story is a work of high creativity and love. Enthusiasm and personal interest in it are required if the story is to have quality and engagement, be unique and full of personality. While writing we look forward to certain scenes or sequences that we expect to have special impact on the plot and the characters' development.

You wait for the scene to come up perhaps from the moment we create the first page! In the case of webcomics the scene might take years to come up before the audience.

And then, it comes.

And you're… not sure it's what you've imagined it to be. Or perhaps it's a lot more that what you have imagined it to be.

And then you second guess yourself. Maybe you've gone too far. Maybe this is too light/ too dark/ too silly/ too serious/ too inappropriate/ too shocking/ too bland for what you were going for.

It's a terrible place to be. How to deal with it?

In my opinion, you have to trust your own self and your initial design. If you have done the work needed, then the scene is there because it needs to be there.

The team that created the Incredibles mentioned in one of their commentaries that at some point they had gone over and over the script so many times that no joke seemed funny to them anymore, and they feared they'd made a bland, unfunny movie.

They of course had created the exact opposite. They pressed through the self doubt because they trusted that the impression they had was one of constant exposure, rather than the quality of the work itself.

The same goes for any creator. Needing to go over and over the same scene several times might distort it in our perception and that creates self doubt.

The best thing to do is to shut down the self doubting voice. However, if that just isn't possible, try stepping away from what you're working on for a while. Do something else, work on something different, to clear your mind and return with fresher eyes. See how it looks to you then. Chances are it will look great to you again!

But even in the event it doesn't, you'll know what to do with it.

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