36: Confidence
12/11/2012
Just finished the leopard stalking scene, and it took me 17 days to write four pages. Written from Pardos’ point of view. It feels overly contrived with too much exposition. Too much cleverness, and not enough creativity. Considering the interesting ways I could have gotten inside the mind of a leopard, what I ended up with wasn’t very inventive.
I think I went into it burdened with too many tools. Too many notes on leopards that only served to confine me. Too many tidbits of information I tried to play in. It weighed it down, damn near suffocating it. Maybe killing it.
But having just now reread it, it seems okay. Hopefully it will at least be salvageable when fresh eyes rework it. Without starting all over with an entirely different approach to depict it, I did the best I can… for now.
Present-Day Reflection
6/30/2026
This has happened more times than I care to admit, especially with the early drafts when I lacked confidence and relied too much on research. It really wasn’t until I returned to those early drafts and rewrote everything I had at the time – around late 2017 – that I began to trust my creative intuition and began to write better pros.
It wasn’t until I began writing The Ghost Frog quest though in 2023 that my confidence was strong enough for me to write chapters with only a passing glance at research notes. Writing whole chapters in a day, then rewriting them the next day. The Ghost Frog chapters were really my breakout chapters as a writer in terms of writing confidently with speed and without perfectionism second-guessing on the first drafts.
That’s when I first began to feel like a real writer instead of a wannabe.
