Much of my day is eaten up with feeling guilty that I am not doing enough of whatever it is I should be doing. I know that in order to earn a living I must put in a certain number of hours a day at the keyboard, which means that every hour that I spend making coffee, reading the paper, browsing the internet or faffing about in the garden is potentially ‘wasted’.
I know that it is sensible to finish the book with the closest deadline before allowing myself to be distracted by the interesting new project which has just arrived and which is not yet earning any money, but often that temptation is impossible to resist. Then there is the guilt attached to not writing as many words as I think perhaps I should, or perhaps not editing them tightly enough, or the fear that perhaps I’m just not good enough to be earning my living as a writer at all.
All the time self-doubt is nagging away at the back of my mind, telling me that I have been lucky to get away with earning my living in such an enjoyable way for this long and sooner or later I am going to be exposed as a fraud and no more work will ever come my way.
When the children were small I felt guilty for not working hard enough to provide them with financial security, and then I felt guilty for always being away or distracted or locked in my office when I should have been giving them more attention, despite the fact that I stood on the sidelines of a million school netball matches and events involving horses and children doing incredibly dangerous-looking things, feeling guilty as I did so about the hours of potential work that were seeping away as I cheered on the offspring.
I feel guilty for having to work in the evening because I’ve procrastinated all day, and then I feel guilty for starting to write earlier in the day without putting as much thought and research into the project as perhaps I should have done.
Is it possible, however, that these sorts of guilt and self-doubt are the fuels which drive us, and that without them we would simply stay in bed all day watching television and ordering takeaways?