Standing Up to My Inner Critic

Among the high points of 2012, my first year as a published novelist, was the Debut Authors breakfast held in a cavernous ballroom at Thrillerfest, the writer’s conference that then took place at the Grand Hyatt hotel in midtown Manhattan.

We debut authors nibbled toast and eggs and stared down at the hundred or so conference participants gathered for the traditional breakfast celebrating first-time thriller writers. We’d been herded through the months leading up to Thrillerfest by Jenny Milchman, who answered all our nervous questions.

Now here I was, awarded a place at a long table planted on a dais alongside fellow debuts and new friends like Donna Galanti and Brian Andrews. We were introduced to the coffee-chugging attendees by a gracious Douglas Preston, author of many bestsellers.

Next up was Steve Berry, another celebrated bestseller, to deliver a witty speech in his Georgian drawl about the perils of writing that second novel. Steve wanted to ensure we enjoyed our day in the debut sun because the clouds could be moving in. Doubting voices inside our heads would become hard to ignore. For some, misguided pressure to write an earth-shattering follow-up could prove devouring. I remember Steve saying, “The longer you write, the harder it gets.” I nodded, but deep down, I didn’t believe him.

“The longer you write, the harder it gets”

Steve Berry

Now, I don’t want to imply that, sitting at that banquet table, I thought I knew better than Steve Berry. I simply considered myself lucky that I’d already finished my second novel, then in the pipeline at Touchstone Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. But if I’m being scrupulously honest, I thought that being a newspaper and magazine writer/editor, generating bylines since I was twenty-two, put me in a different category than some of my fellow debuts. I wasn’t as scared as them. Of course, publishing a novel was a big deal, but not that big a deal.

No, I told myself that July morning, I wasn’t going to fall victim to doubts about myself, to allow the nastiness of an Inner Critic to cripple my newfound love of fiction writing. No way.

And so here I am, thirteen years later, wondering if it was hubris or denial that led me to shrug off the kindly warnings of a man who’d written a bevy of bestsellers by then (and more since). For in the years following Thrillerfest, I’ve had to contend with a loud and singularly mean Inner Critic. It has, if not crippled my fiction, put me in the category of someone who would sometimes prefer to cook, nap, garden, hang out with friends, binge-watch, pay bills, or even, yes, rearrange my spice cabinet than make my wordcount of the day.

My novel-writing foxhole buddies and I agree that when you’re starting out in publishing, you hear plenty of wisdom and not a few warnings. What most of us have in common is that, deep down, we think, “This just won’t apply to me.” In my first column for MissDemeanors, let me take you through my long dance with the Inner Critic.

Obstacles to Publishing Success Emerge 

Because I was new to the opaque world of book publishing, I didn’t fully appreciate how certain events well beyond my control had already thrown sharp tacks in the path of my shiny new novelist bicycle.

The first ominous event took place well before Thrillerfest. A Touchstone editor bought my Tudor-era thriller, The Crown, in an auction at the end of July 2010 and set its pub date for January 2012, but then she took another job in early 2011 and left me behind. Now, in the world of magazines, law, and many other businesses, when one person leaves a company, that person’s unfinished work is transferred to a colleague, and the work doesn’t suffer. That’s what I thought would happen to me. I didn’t understand that for a novel to be “orphaned” is often akin to the Tombstone Piledriver in a wrestling match. I’d be assigned four different acquiring editors for my three novels while at Touchstone. Can you be orphaned multiple times? I’m living proof that the answer is yes. This created definite challenges when you need your editor to serve as a passionate advocate for your book in the overcrowded marketplace.

The second harbinger of doom was the closing of Borders, a chain of bookstores friendly to debut authors that I was told would likely have helped build my fiction career. RIP, Borders. The third was not a corporate collapse but a shift in reading trends: Tudor fiction was on the wane. I heard that other authors of 16th-century-set books were having trouble getting contracts. I’d been fascinated by Tudor England since I was thirteen years old and had already created the handle “tudorscribe” on social media. Surely I wouldn’t have to shift. Right?

This meant that while The Crown sold well (and even earned a favorable review in Oprah Magazine), The Chalice sold half as many copies as the first book in the Joanna Stafford series. I tried not to take it too hard. I channeled my energy into writing The Tapestry, the third. 

At this juncture, it’s important to say that external forces were not solely to blame. Certain mistakes flowed from my keyboard. While some novelists try to protect themselves from criticism, I read every review of The Crown, whether from a trade journal, a magazine, or a reader, and looked for patterns. It seemed that some didn’t like the murder mystery subplot of The Crown. That encouraged me to make The Chalice a high-stakes thriller that was not tied to a murder investigation. However, I didn’t execute that to everyone’s liking either. A Toronto bookstore owner who’d hand-sold The Crown admitted to me she wasn’t as enthusiastic about The Chalice. Gulp. The book won the Romantic Times Award for Best Historical Mystery, and collecting my prize on the conference stage in New Orleans was a hoot. But still, I felt worried.

The Inner Critic Finds Her Microphone

Doubts whispered in my ear while writing my third novel, The Tapestry. However, I silenced the self-criticism sufficiently to finish, and I felt excited about my creation. I thought the suspense ratcheted high, the characters were compelling, and I had created an evocative atmosphere. So what happened? The Tapestry sold half as well as The Chalice, which meant it was pretty much a bomb.

This put me on the back foot. Was it a case of Touchstone repeatedly orphaning me? Did I not get enough marketing? Was the fadeout of Tudor fiction to blame? Or was I just a crappy fiction writer?

Despite these fears, I wasn’t ready to give up. I loved creating layered characters, coming up with shocking twists, and chasing after those research nuggets that make a thriller special. After seeing some exquisite Sevres porcelain on display at Hillwood Estate in Washington, D.C., I wrote an 18th-century thriller revolving around espionage in the porcelain world. I created Genevieve Planche, a Huguenot artist heroine. In doing so I called upon my family background, which I found deeply rewarding. The Blue, published in 2018, may be my most successful novel after The Crown. But it wasn’t easy to finish (I wrote 20,000 words, then started over), and it took my agent months and months to place the book with a publisher.  I liked my new editor and marketing team at Lume (now Joffe Books). Yet, I was beginning to feel like a wounded warrior.

My subsequent historical novels–Dreamland and The Fugitive Colours–were much harder to write than my earlier books. The reason: an Inner Critic that wouldn’t shut up. It was a combination of feeling roughed up by the publishing industry and struggling with genuine doubt about my ability. I kept thinking of what Dorothy Parker said: “I hate to write, but I love having written.”

I was proud of each book I put out into the world, and I tried to enjoy the high points: receiving a reader’s email, speaking at a library, triumphing in a research deep dive. But more and more, I would have given anything to return to the blissful ignorance of the five years spent writing my debut. Back then, I took fiction classes at Gotham Writer’s Workshop and wrote The Crown in congenial workshops led by novelist Russell Rowland, exchanging chapters with fellow workshoppers like Emilya Naymark. It was terribly exciting to imagine what lay ahead. Now I’m glad that, while writing my debut, I didn’t know!

By 2018, creating fiction had become psychologically, even physically, grueling. While hunched over my laptop, my stomach got tied in knots and my back throbbed. I was so hard on myself that producing 500 words daily could feel like torture. My Inner Critic refrain went something like this: “This isn’t interesting…your dialogue stinks…this character isn’t coming to life…reads too much like an info dump…where’s the emotion?…no one will want to keep reading…why did you think this was a good idea in the first place?…ouch, that new Netgalley review stings.”

It was comforting to know that I wasn’t alone. The International Writer’s Collective has said, “You know that voice that crops up in your head when you’re writing and tells you that you’re not creative enough, not clever enough, and that your writing will never live up to your own or other people’s expectations? Some people refer to that voice as their inner critic or inner censor.”

I’d identified the problem. Now I needed a solution.

Can Someone Help Me Dig Out of This Hole?

I read blog posts and books about the creative process. However, much of the advice seemed aimed at writer’s block, which wasn’t my problem. Nor did I have “imposter’s syndrome.” I just wanted to muzzle my Inner Critic to make writing fiction less fraught.

One novelist who inspired me to think differently about writing was Walter Mosley. When I interviewed him for The Big Thrill, he told me, “Writing a novel is gathering smoke; it’s an excursion into the ether of ideas.” While a writer needs to nurture their self-confidence, creating a novel isn’t easy, and that reality needs to be respected. “It’s not a novel unless it’s bigger than your head,” he told me. Walter believes strongly that any novelist can grow in craft through writing every morning—that’s when we gather the most smoke. “You get deeper and deeper into yourself, and as you get deeper, certain images come up.”

“It’s not a novel unless it’s bigger than your head“–Walter Mosley

Up to now, I outlined my novels and rewrote constantly as I went. Perhaps because I started in journalism, I was something of a Type A novelist. Ether? Smoke? Hard-bitten editors had trained me in the news trenches to begin with an inverted pyramid and “who-what-where-why-when.” Of course I didn’t write a novel as if it were a short piece of nonfiction. But I had to ask, was being so analytical really working for me as my fiction career went along?

The year 2020 brought a life change. Months after my mother died of Covid-19, my husband and I hit the ejector seat on New York City. Thanks to a referral from mystery novelist Erica Obey, I was accepted into the Byrdcliffe Artists Residency program in Woodstock and moved with my husband and two children into an early 20th-century farmhouse in the Catskills woods. To my delight, and the bemusement of some friends, I found myself photographing deer, rabbits, and even the occasional bear, going to moonlit dance parties, swimming in a lake, and making metal rings in a lesson from Robin “The Hammer” Ludwig, himself inspired by Norse myths and Tolkien and a one-time jeweler for Billy Idol.

I was ready to shake up my creative method. I tried following one of Mosley’s “rules”: hitting my word count first thing in the morning, without judgment, tapping into images and ideas surfacing before coffee. Sometimes our subconscious solves story problems while we sleep, Mosley said. We need to take advantage.

I also plunged into writing sprints, first with my neighbor, playwright and actress Daniela Thome. I timed my writing sessions—twenty minutes worked best for me—and focused on speed and flow without stopping to edit.

Early morning writing and doing sprints did help with my seventh novel, The Orchid Hour. I put my Inner Critic on mute for periods of time. I wish I could say my problem was solved. But the mute button never stayed pressed for long.

I turned to my friend Peter Andrews, who I met in a screenwriter’s workshop led by Max Adams. Peter has helpful ideas about creativity, taught in his How to Write Fast posts. One way to shut down my Inner Critic would be to write a first draft without stopping once to edit, treating it like a giant sprint. I wrote a novella, The Ghost of Madison Avenue, using a rapid draft method. But I just couldn’t make it work for me in novel form. I applied other of his ideas successfully, like jumping past difficult passages to a scene I really want to write, without worrying about continuity.

Some of the most intriguing advice I heard came from my friend Libbie Hawker, who has written many popular historical novels as well as the book Take Off Your Pants: Outline for Faster, Better Writing. She shared with me: “I try to use my inner critic for improvement, not for self-oppression. I do acknowledge all my weaknesses as a writer, but I don’t see those things as something to feel ashamed of or something that will hold me back. Instead, they’re areas to focus on so that I can grow more and become better at what I do. Whenever I spot a weakness in my craft, I get motivated to find ways to improve it. The inner critic helps me identify what I should work on next, and then I have my marching orders, and I know where I need to be concentrating my focus with my next project. A bonus of approaching the inner critic this way is that it gives you concrete goals, so you can actually measure your success by objective metrics and gain a clear sense of your own improvement.”

“The inner critic helps me identify what I should work on next, and then I have my marching orders, and I know where I need to be concentrating my focus with my next project.”

Libbie Hawker

Dare I do this–embrace my Inner Critic as a writing coach? After years of fending off a ridicule-laced refrain, I wasn’t courageous enough to take such a step. Maybe someday.

Finding a Way to Co-Exist with a Critic

While writing The Versailles Formula, my eighth historical thriller, I finally achieved a breakthrough. It came as I mulled over a bit of writing advice I’ve always found inane. “Write the kind of book you want to read.” Duh. Why in God’s name would I go through all this hard work to write a book I would not want to read? Yet this led to my considering another perspective: people I knew quite well would want to read my kind of novel.

What I pictured one morning while at my laptop was not the response of a Goodreads critic or a fellow novelist but one of my valued readers. In my thirteen years of publishing historical fiction–stretching from the Tudor age to Prohibition-era New York–I’d managed to attract the attention of some readers who, to put it simply, like the way I write. They like the use of first person, the strong woman at the center, the atmospheric detail, the “lore,” and the plot twists. I picked three of them to inhabit my mind and they became a friendly chorus. Even though the readers in question have no idea I’ve put them to work like this, for me, they are a Nancy Bilyeau support squad.

Have I put my Inner Critic six feet under? No. In today’s sharp-elbowed book-publishing world, I’m never going to be free of self-doubt. But I’ve managed to install alongside my Inner Critic a friendlier set of voices.

I have no idea if this approach will result in gangbuster sales–of course I hope so! But, and to me this is even more important, picturing these readers’ response as I go has put the pleasure back into writing more than any time since I wrote that debut novel.

Nancy Bilyeau

Nancy Bilyeau is the author of eight novels and one novella of historical suspense. Her latest thriller, ‘The Versailles Formula, set in 18th-century Europe, will be published in spring 2025. A former staff editor at Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, and InStyle, Nancy lives with her family in the Hudson Valley in New York.

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