How do you handle the slow days?
How do you respond to feelings of self-doubt and impostor syndrome?
John Steinbeck contemplated on these questions in 1938 as he worked on his book, The Grapes of Wrath, which would eventually win the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
However, while writing The Grapes of Wrath, his state of mind was a cocktail of emotions including impostor syndrome as he felt that the book would expose his limitations.
Part of the reason was that Steinbeck believed he wouldn’t do justice in describing the state of the farmers experiencing the Great Depression.
This self-doubt had significant implications.
For instance, Steinbeck had previously developed a 60,000 manuscript, The L'Affaire Lettuceberg, before publishing the Grapes of Wrath but later destroyed it as he viewed it to be too satirical and mean-spirited.
I don't know whether I could write a decent book now... Something is poisoned in me. You pages—ten of you—are the dribble cup—you are the cloth to wipe up the vomit. Maybe I can get these fears and disgusts on you and then burn you up.
Working Days
By all means, Steinbeck’s mind was working against him.
How would Steinbeck overcome this?
He determined to stack one thing; his minimum valuable contribution.
Steinbeck devised the “little contribution” rule where he treated his writing as a series of small letters or small diary entries.
Steinbeck saw that when he considered his next work as a mountain to be conquered, he became anxious and self-doubtful.
However, when he only focused on writing one page, his doubts reduced. The secret was reducing his horizon during the slow days.
"In writing, habit determines much. If I can keep this habit for the next hundred days, I will have a finished book... I must not think of the whole thing. It is too much. I must think only of today’s work."
Working Days
By stacking this one page anchor, Steinbeck quietened his self-doubts of “I have done nothing today.”
Ernest Hemingway adopted a similar approach to deal with his slow days and fear of losing his ability to write.
Every morning, Hemingway stood at a crossroad.
Rather than being crippled by his self-doubt and self-defeating attitudes, he decided to track how many words he had written at the end of the day on a large piece of cardboard.
"On a large piece of cardboard... Ernest had a chart on which he kept a daily record of his word count. 'I write every morning as soon after first light as possible... you can see by the numbers on the chart that the daily output varies: 450, 575, 462, 1250, 512. The higher numbers are when I am throwing a lot of dialogue.' He used the chart to keep from 'kidding himself' about how much work he was actually getting done."
