The I'm not good enoughs have been plaguing me this week, and it sucks. There are a bevy of awesome pep talks by notable writers that you can read for encouragement, but sometimes these kind words cause insecurity to take a turn toward the bitter.
"Sure," we think, "easy for Aimee Bender to say. How nice for you, Dave Eggers! But I'm not good enough."
You know what? You're probably not.
But it doesn't matter. No one is waiting for your novel (or mine, for that matter.) There are too many novels already, and not nearly enough readers. The world is not thirsting for your prose.
There are so many reasons why you're not good enough. You may not have the skill or the discipline. You may be at the stage where you just write stories about your ex-boyfriend over and over again, or derivative fantasy tales featuring thinly disguised Hogwarts pupils. You may have done the professional thing for a while, and now you're blocked and burnt out. Whatever the particular situation, you're not where you want to be.
And if you quit, you probably never will be. The alternative, of course, is to carry on. If you carry on, the work doesn't stop November 30th. (Let's be realistic. 50,000 words is rather short for a novel. Even when you are done with your rough draft, you're going to edit, and edit, and edit again.) Even then, most of your birth pangs are for naught, the babies we're working so hard to bear have infinitesimal odds of being published. What's the point, really?
There isn't one, but the only chance we have at lessening self-doubt is to get better.
The only way to get better is to do the work.
NaNoWriMo teaches you how to do the work on a daily basis, even when it isn't fun, even when your muse is drinking gin in someone else's attic. You are learning to show up. That's a hell of a thing.
It's also the only thing you can do.
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