Creative crashing...

And a crisis of confidence

A few weeks ago a couple of artists I know and admire greatly both mentioned that they’d been going through wobbles with self-doubt in their creative practice. I know this is part of the creative process but I was still taken aback to hear them both expressing such feelings. I empathised with them and was grateful that they shared because I’d also been experiencing self-doubts in an internal battlefield.

I decided to draw a comic strip about this for The Observer New Review last Sunday. It may have been a bit too raw and confused as the first version was rejected. After a re-think this was the printed version:

To re-address the balance my mum does say a lot of very helpful and wise things to me that I reflect on a lot. Sorry mum for mentioning the ‘you’re going to crash the car’ story, I love you! The memory of this incident has been very helpful for me to re-frame things in my mind.

My Crash:

Last year the graphic novel I’d been working on for years and years was published. I’d been working mostly in isolation with this story, I didn’t share the process or the work with anyone. I do not recommend this method! Although I loved this slow process of making very detailed drawings and being in a world of my own I’d missed something important. My editor Dan Franklin, who really believed in me and my work, had retired. He still read through my finished work and gave feedback but I wasn’t sure what my relationship was with the publishing house without him there.

Because I hadn’t made myself known sooner to the publishers I think my book understandably seem to have fallen off the radar.

I found out that that year also had an usually busy publishing schedule, I imagine everyone had impossibly heavy workloads and there didn’t seem to be the bandwidth for my book. For me it was a very different experience I’d had with publishing in the past. And from that, I was internalising the experience as there being something very wrong with my work. I ruminated on comments made, I ruminated on comments not made and worse still I invented the worst kinds of comments of all. I was crashing my confidence in the garage. No one else was doing that to me, it was my mind driving the car and at times the experience has been like wading through treacle.

In times of mental garage crashing it’s helpful to get back to the why. Why did I get in the car in the first place, where was I going? What am I trying to do with my work?

Part of my practice is the ongoing story of Fluffy beyond the pages of a graphic novel over here on his Instagram account where he can communicate and engage with readers and the story making process becomes collaborative. It was his birthday last week and gave me a good opportunity to look at his why, which is also quite similar to my why.

I have a favour to ask, if you’ve read my book How to Make Life Better and enjoyed it, please do leave a review somewhere on the internet (even Amazon) it really helps with visibility. I’m totally relying on word of mouth for this book and reviews are all part of that.

Also if you have had any crashes it would be great to hear what got you out of the garage and beyond the treacle wading.

Thank you for reading and your support!

Simone