It’s a rare artist who is convinced that he or she isn’t a complete fraud. Self-doubt and creativity are two symbiotic ingredients in the swamp of an artist’s brain that are locked in a copulating mind-fuck that proclaims your brilliance in the same thrust as it reaffirms your abject stupidity and the ultimate futility of your efforts. There is no part of the creative process that isn’t fraught with self-doubt. The moment you think you’ve made something good, you are immediately suspicious of your own positive opinion of it, knowing, as you do, the fallible nature of your talents.

So, I was having that itching feeling that everything I had ever written was missing some essential thing that made it actually good, and that if I didn’t find it, I may as well just hang up my wannabe-novelist spurs, lean into my oh-so-glamorous pharma advertising career, and generally get on with having simple, if somewhat vapid creative life. Since I frequently struggle with the notion that I’m a total hack, I assumed, as usual, that this latest version of that feeling was just the garden-variety self-doubt/loathing that represents the artsy-fartsy end of the narcissism spectrum. I thought it would pass like a bad mood and I’d soon continue steadily working through the first third of my new writing project, which is a triptych of narratives about the apocalypse.

But when I rounded the bend to 85 pages and still had no fucking clue what was happening with my story or my characters, I thought maybe I should take step back, do some planning, and get some advice.

So, I turned to my patient and funny and smart writing partner Jen Larsen, author of Stranger Here and Future Perfect. I sent her my meandering 85 pages, my messy brainstorming notes and character sketches and said, plaintively: HALP.  A few days later I got a book in the mail called Story Genius by Lisa Cron—a gift from Jen. Whenever Jen sends me writing books (which she has a few times now), I know that’s a bad sign. That means my shit is such a mess, even smarty-pants Jen can’t articulate where to start fixing it.

My confession is, I haven’t read any of these books. Rather, I have started all of them. But after a couple of chapters, my attention always turned back to the novel I was reading. Or I’d read the first couple of chapters and think, yes, yes, yes, I get it. I know all this already. This is common fucking sense. Why the hell am I going to waste hours of my life reading a book about what I already know? Poo-poo, I say.

I was fairly certain Story Genius was going to meet the same fate. But due dilligence and all, I promised Jen I would try. And for the first couple of chapters I slogged through some interesting information about the evolutionary role stories have played in the survival of the human race blah blah while suffering Cron’s somewhat inane writing style. But I also realized that she was describing, to the inane letter, the problems I’d been having with my writing. Not just the problems I recognized, but the problem that I intuited; she defined the missing piece. I wasn’t experiencing the standard-issue artistic self-doubt. I have a real narrative problem that I recognized existed, but I was trying to solve it in totally the wrong way.

Being sensitive to the non-writer people who might be reading this, I won’t bore you with the nerdly and involved explanation of what that problem is and how I wasn’t fixing it right. Suffice to say that if your protagonist is a materialistic asshole who steals dogs for money, you should be able to identify various, highly specific details about his past and his psychology that made him that way in order for your readers to slip into the warm, wet tide of empathy to get carried along through the current of your story happily and readily. Entertaining tableaus of mischief, mayhem, violence, wackiness, romance, or whatever, that come one after the other does not a story make, no matter how well-written they are. As the writer, it’s imperative that I must master the multifaceted details of why everything is happening.

Now, this is something I know. I know it the way I know the sky is blue, because, well, obviously. But much like I can never quite remember the scientific, atmospheric reasons the sky is blue, I never kept the technical tools at hand to build out the worlds of my stories to the degree I needed to. The fact of knowing it to be true seemed sufficient to practice it. But it’s not. Not at all it turns out.

Now I have the tools. Now I have a path to take, complete with GPS-guided directions courtesy Cron’s insightful (if obnoxiously written) observations about character and plot development. That’s the good news. The bad news is that to use my shiny new tools and make my stories way, way better stories that people might actually want to read, I have to...Start. All. Over.

Not such a big deal with this apocalypse novel. That’s barely begun. And the novel about the disenfranchised rockstars locked in a battle for professional and artistic relevance, well, I guess 200+ pages of that is barely a first draft, right? Right. Doesn’t even have an ending yet. And the semi-autobiographical short story about avoiding a psychotic ex while on a business trip in Dallas, well, that piece of shit has nowhere to go but up.

But first on the list of deconstruction and reconstruction is the novel about the dog thief. The first novel I ever attempted. The novel I started writing in 2009. The novel I’ve taken through half a dozen workshops and classes and writers’ groups. The novel I’ve written upwards of ten drafts of, and thousands of pages. The novel I’ve been carrying around in my brain for so long I dream of its characters as if they were real people. But also the project that has mystified me the most; all of that work, all of that diligence—how is it possible that it still sucks?

Thanks to Lisa Cron’s book, I have found the source of its suckitude, and I have begun the arduous and maddening and exhilarating process of taking it all on this new path through the dark woods of creativity, shedding pages in my wake, hoping by the time I emerge out the other side I’ll have a manuscript that’s a quantum leap closer to the book I want it to be, and not the cocked-up hash job it currently is. (Though I have to say the ending is magnificent.)

And even if I am wildly successful in my efforts, and fortunate enough to at last write something I think is reasonably good, and even if I may one day sell said manuscript and receive a check for some amount for it, and that check doesn’t bounce and I pay my ConEd bill with it or whatever—even if all that happens, I will still be nearly constantly gripped by self-doubt; I will still loath all my output to some degree; part of me will always be suspicious that I am in actuality a hack, an impostor. And I’m grateful for that, because it’s that very same self-doubt that knew a problem existed in the first place—even if I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. When you think you’re a hack, you have an eye for hacky work, which will make you your own worst critic—but also, your most ruthlessly honest one.