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Stop Letting Your Inner Critic Destroy Your Creativity
A lesson from Arthur Conan Doyle on why you need to value your work
Have you ever started writing a story or a blog post and felt like it wasn’t turning out the way you had envisioned it in your head?
The words aren’t flowing quite the way you would like. Yet, you spent so much time working on it, that you decide to hit publish.
“It’s awful,” you think. “Certainly not my best work.”
But your audience loves it.
In fact, they love it even more than anything else you’ve written. They demand more of the same.
What are you to do? Is your writing really as bad as you think?
Something similar happened to Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous creator of Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes’s Greatest Enemy Wasn’t Moriarty
“I was glad to withdraw Holmes before the public were too weary of him,” Arthur Conan Doyle wrote to a journalist in 1927, several years before Doyle’s death.
It was not, of course, the public that was weary of Holmes, but Doyle himself.
He had already tried to kill off the famous consulting detective in 1893.
In 1891 he had written to his mother, “I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”
His mother’s reply: “You won’t! You can’t! You mustn’t!”
But in 1893 Doyle followed through with his plan. In “The Final Problem,” Holmes falls to his death while fighting his archenemy, Professor Moriarty, over the Reichenbach Falls.
However, public outcry was so great that Doyle was forced to resurrect the detective.
This article in The Wall Street Journal observes that Doyle “saw his detective fiction as hackwork and strongly preferred to write historical novels. ‘If I had never touched Holmes, who has tended to obscure my higher work, my position in literature would at the present moment be a more commanding one,’ he once complained.”
