Confidence

I was talking to an artist friend of mine the other day about confidence. It’s a strange thing. I find myself extremely confident when I am in the organic stage of creating. The outlining. The first draft. The shooting. The rough cut.

As I’m sure a painter is when they are sketching or planning.

A musician is while they are jamming and composing.

An actor is while they are rehearsing and improvising.

But the closer I get to revising, refining and putting it out there, the more my confidence is chipped away. It’s easy in the initial stages to write off possible criticism as laziness on the viewer or reader’s part. Or ignorance. It’s easy to say, they don’t understand what I’m going for. Or, I’m just ahead of my time.

But the truth is, for me at least, I think it’s my laziness or ignorance at the beginning. Which is a necessary part of the process. I have to allow myself the space to not worry about grammar, punctuation, or logic when I’m laying down my first draft. And hopefully, a lot of that would be done in the outline anyway. I have to have ignorance of what it will be. I have to protect my process with a barrier of confidence.

But then, as I let others lays eyes on it, I begin making excuses. Well, it’s still in the works. I know it’s rough, I’m still working on it. You don’t understand what I’m going for.

I think, just the same, this lack of confidence is a useful tool. Maybe, artists are a little more human than most. And we should embrace that. It’s ok to get hurt when someone doesn’t react to our work like we expect. Everything I’ve done, I imagine in the warmest, smallest womb of my soul, that it is the harbinger of a new movement. That’s it’s going to be so brilliant, the likes of which no one has ever read or seen. In reality, it will most likely be, just a good piece. Nothing more. Nothing less. And that’s fine.

So, it’s interesting, how wide the pendulum swings from confidence at the start, to a crumbling questioning of one’s self once it’s out there.

But we keep doing it just the same.