The Unfinished Statue

There is a problem that I have struggled with for years now: comparing someone’s final version with my first draft. The cycle is endless, and even though I know the solution to this problem, it never goes away. Maybe I love feeling inferior, or maybe it’s impostor syndrome that makes me feel that I am not good enough. No matter how much I create, I feel I haven’t done enough. This is specific to writing. In other areas of life, I get excited by even the smallest of my achievements, but when it comes to writing, even my most profound essays don’t satisfy me. There are ideas I have mentioned here that came naturally to me. I realised this when I later encountered the same ideas in a book or on social media, and wondered how I had somehow arrived at the same conclusion without ever reading an academic paper on it. With fiction, this problem goes one step deeper because I generally read the best fiction writers in the business and then compare their storytelling with mine, which is mostly…