@#$! Help! I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!

 

Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.  You know that sound.  It’s the sound of panic.  The sound of uncertainty.  Self doubt creeping into your mind as you move along with your WIP and you’ve suddenly found yourself staring at your first page.  Again.  Wondering if it’s good enough to attract an agent.  You’ve read too many agent blogs and now you think your first 250 words are not hooky enough, bold enough, or white-knuckle enough.

Oh my God.  Time to rewrite the first page.  Again.

Okay, so maybe you’re over-reacting.  You’ve read yourself into a mess of insecurity.  So much so that you just can’t move on to your next chapter until you’ve gone back over your first page.  Just one more time.  You promise yourself this will be the last time.  Until you head over to Nathan Bransford’s blog on a Monday and find his latest First 250 crit.  Or maybe Author! Author!:: Anne Mini’s Blog and found her slashings of first pages.

It’s enough to make anyone crumble in fear and run their MS through shredder.

I find myself in constant fear that my first page sucks.  I already never think my writing is good enough but now I’m terrified at the prospect of querying.  I’m too busy being worried about what kind of reaction I’m going to get and wishing I had a literary agent as a friend that would help me to know when I’ve done enough, when I’ve gotten it right because I may have already and blew past it on rewrite 20 because I was too frenzied, too caught up in the “first page has to grab me” mantra of agents.  I get so worried that it’s just not enough so I rework it and then I think it’s trying too hard.  And then I rework it to bring it back down and the cycle just continues.  

Reading agent blogs is enough to shake the confidence right out of you. Sometimes you just have to let it go and be proud of what you have and hope that others will like it, too.

How do you keep from second-guessing yourself right out of something that is perfect the way it is?  Where is the balancing point and where is the tipping point?  How do you know?