How the inner critic affects your creative work

Your critic can be a helpful editor or harmful admonisher.

I met author Rachel Macy Stafford in Indianapolis (April 2023). Rachel writes and teaches about how to be kind to and trust ourselves, which is advice I find useful in tackling the inner critic in my life.

The critic, when unrestrained, begins by picking apart what you do, and then eventually moves into picking apart who you are. The inner critic isn’t fond of the pursuit of a dream, nor of risk, nor of uncertainty. It wants to tell you all the reasons you shouldn’t do something, or can’t, or will never succeed if you try.

“Aren’t you too young to write a memoir?” This was a question, spoken more like a statement, that three people independently have asked me: my mother-in-law, a close friend of mine, and a radio show host.

The first time this happened, I was taken aback. It had never occurred to me that I was “too young” to write a memoir. My friend posed the question with indignation, scoffing as she said it. At the time, I was in my mid-thirties and had only begun considering the idea of penning my story in the distant future.

What I believed then, and still do today, is that a good story isn’t about a person’s age, but about a) what they’ve been through, and b) how they are able to gain meaning from their life experience. The ability with which a person can articulate insight about a particular adversity is, to me, what makes a story powerful.

Now I am 43. Not even two months ago, I was interviewed on a radio show, in which the host asked me what my future plans included, now that I have jumped out of the non-fiction spirituality boat and into the sea of a new genre: memoir. When I mentioned I was revising my first manuscript, he asked the dreaded question, and I winced a little. My answer was the same as it was eight years ago: It’s not about how old or young you are; a good story can be told at any age, as long as there is depth and growth evident in the narrative arc.

Here’s the problem with the aren’t-you-too-young-to-write-a-memoir bit: I can tell myself I don’t believe it. I can offer logical reasons to myself and others as to why I should pursue telling my story. But the internalized message that, yes, I probably am too young to write my memoir, feeds my inner critic, which is an old voice formed in my youth from the criticisms of various adults who were important to me.

The inner critic isn’t fond of the pursuit of a dream, nor of risk, nor of uncertainty. It wants to tell you all the reasons you shouldn’t do something, or can’t, or will never succeed if you try. Its intent is to derail your goal, especially the closer you get to the end result. Because as you progress in actualizing a dream, fear is amplified in you. And fear is the one emotion the inner critic loves about you. When fear surfaces, the critic pounces on it and uses it as leverage to substantiate its arguments.

I’ve completed the first “vomit draft” (thanks Allison K. Williams for that definition) of my first memoir (I write first memoir, because I intend to write others). And now, suddenly, the inner critic is going haywire. I find its presence almost like when a fire alarm is pulled in a building: loud, obnoxious, alerting me to danger, confusing me, convincing me that everything is going to shit.

When I asked myself during a recent morning journaling session, Why is my inner critic so active lately, I could pinpoint it to the recent manuscript revisions I’d finished. I’m one step closer to my goal, and I’m continuing to move forward with it. The gritty part of my nature has already decided that I will revise this book until it is the best version of itself —not perfect, but good enough. If that means I must rewrite parts of it, severely cut thousands of words, and elaborate or expound on important details, then I will do it.

I’ve never done this before. And it terrifies me.

It’s not that I’ve never written a book before. In fact, I have written and published seven. But those books came easily to me, because they were concepts I could neatly organize into chapters based on the overarching theme: grief, the spirituality of waiting, or parenting based on the Beatitudes. This book is different. It is an imprint of my heart, and therefore, of my deepest self. And I’m petrified that in laying bare my soul to the world, I just might fail at certain criteria that define success for me: relevance, resonance, and encouragement.

Once I finished the first revision and sent the updated manuscript to an independent editor I hired, the inner critic asked me almost constantly if I really believed my story could reach a wider audience, if it was worth the time and effort. If it was a worthy story. If I was worthy.

Do you see this spiral? The critic, when unrestrained, begins by picking apart what you do, and then eventually moves into picking apart who you are. What’s difficult about writing a true life story is that the overlap between the two begets a problem, in which you interpret the rejection of your story as a rejection of yourself.

Then, the critic started taunting me with (reasonable) statements in order to dissuade me from continuing on the path toward my goal of landing a literary agent and getting my book published. Here is a sample of what it tells me every time I sit down to write:

Yeah, sure, you might already be a published author, but those were very niched books and published by small presses. You’ll never make it in the bigger industry.

Okay, so you have built some credibility as an author and speaker, but do you really think anyone is going to listen to someone like you? No one is really listening to you now, so what makes you think this book is going to change that?

You don’t have the money or clout or credentials to go big.

You’re too proud of yourself. Your goals indicate that you aren’t satisfied with just being a small-time writer. Now you think you need to aim for the impossible.

Remember how every seasoned, agented author has told you that it’s going to take a hundred rejections or more before anyone will take you on? Also, that memoir is the hardest sell for a book genre. You might as well forget it. It’s not going to happen.

The critic wins when I agree with it. But once I do, I feel a sense of defeat. And then I second guess my intentions, my aspirations, and my motivations. Often, I will begin to doubt my ability to write at all, adopting the viewpoint (of the critic) that my work does not shine or stand out among the rest and I just don’t have what it takes.

Here’s the main thing about the inner critic: it can’t stand uncertainty. And the place where I am in my creative work —the place you might be in right now —is nothing but uncertain. It’s murky, unclear. Really, my book might not be a commercial success. I may not land a literary agent for years, if ever. An infinite number of question marks hover in the atmosphere as I type this, and there’s no way for me to control or manage the outcome, except to keep going.

I don’t say this lightly. I recognize that there are times when it’s wise to quit something, perhaps when we’ve outgrown it or it doesn’t serve a useful or healthy purpose for us anymore. What I mean by keep going is to persevere through the tension of uncertainty and confront my critic when it decides it’s time to protect me from getting hurt again. And when I have exhausted all pathways to my end goal, which is publication, and there’s nothing left to do, that’s when I can step back and reevaluate whether it’s time to move in a new direction.

My most common rebuttal to the critic is, Maybe I will fail, but maybe I won’t. I have to at least try, because I know I’ll regret it the rest of my life if I give up without doing everything I can do.

There’s another element that silences, or at least shrinks, my critic: faith in my story and, ultimately, in myself. When I tell my critic that I believe my story is important —not just to me or my immediate circle of family and friends, but to strangers —when I say I believe it has a universal application and that it’s worth sharing, the critic doesn’t know what to say.

I’ve come to understand that the greatest power over my inner critic is to believe that there is no one else who has lived my life, no one else who can tell my story —only I have and only I can, respectively. When I believe that solidly, I notice that my confidence in both my writing skill and my voice as a writer soar. I am telling myself that it is possible, even likely, that my story will be rejected, but it is still worth sharing.

What I’m currently working on is both recognizing and understanding the purpose of my inner critic. I do this both in therapy and private self-reflection. The critic can be helpful when I am editing or correcting course if it is evaluating a way for me to become better at what I do, if it is constructive. But the critic becomes a menace to both what I do and who I am when its messages are abusive, when it is tearing me down in destructive ways. (Unfortunately, right now the tyrannical judge is outweighing the helpful devil’s advocate for me.)

Paying attention to which side of the critic is speaking —the helpful editor or the harmful admonisher —often directs how we interpret the creative work we put into the world, as well as its value and contribution to a sphere of people outside our tight-knit circle. If the critic is like an open-minded, honest, and objective third party that sits next to you and offers you feedback about how you can improve your work, then the helpful editor is speaking to you, and it’s a good idea to give it heed. But when you find yourself discouraged, procrastinating, or angry, it’s likely that the harmful admonisher of the critic is attempting to sabotage your work (and possibly your life.)

Don’t let the critic win if its goal is to defeat the gift that only you can offer the world.