What do you do when you feel you are not intelligent or clever enough to write good enough?

I'm hoping it's just low self-esteem, but sometimes I feel like my ideas are not good enough and that I couldn't possibly come up with anything worthwhile.

Very few people feel like they can write well enough. Art in general means living with constant dissatisfaction. Your ideas are probably fine—the important thing is to keep at it.

I think intelligence isn't so much of a determining factor in writing as it is a cog in the machine. Writing is a natural process that doesn't come from solely intelligence, but also emotions, experiences, opinions, etc. I'd say the authenticity in what you mean to write truly matters. Don't try to write in a way to seem smart, just write as you do and the intuition will show.

Concerning factual-based intelligence, no writer will have expert knowledge in every field. In fact, I think that writing stories that revolve around certain fields (science and law) or other subjects (mythos and religion) will almost always require a good deal of research. Research is a beautiful thing, and what you learn can give you a better understanding of what you're writing, inspire new ideas, and most importantly allow you to know the rules so you can break them intentionally.

edited 28th Mar '17 11:17:58 PM by SkullySnot

I write dialogues. Because I have all the time in the world to think about lines that the characters are supposed to have come up with nearly instantly. Meaning that they can sound massively smarter than I actually do IRL.

you don't have to be smart good braining to be a writer. just look at some of the tripe that they have on the shelves right now. you just need a memorable plot and have a thesaurus handy to make yourself look more smarterer

I always look at it this way: I could have taken five hours to write this post, but to you it will come off as a seamless non-stop experience. If there are parts to the story I don't feel I'm smart enough to figure out, I wait a few weeks and think about it. No one will know how long it took me to come up with what my characters came up in moments.

i know how you feel op. i too think I'm dumb. i never thought my ideas were remotely original.

Yep, sounds like low self-esteem to me. I think I know the feeling very well.

I believe thinking critically about yourself is good. However, you gotta be smart about it, use your critical thinking to your advantage. I too have thought things about my writing like "This is shit". Well, go the extra mile. "Why is it shit? What bothers me about it, and why?" There might be something worthwhile to it, even it you're the only one that thinks that way. Try to find out what that is, and write it down. Literally. Then dress it up into a pretty sentence.

I find it best do discard such thoughts as "I will never come up with anything worthwhile". They are the junk food for self-doubt, while constructive thoughts are the vegetables.

EDIT: Okay, that last metaphor doesn't work as well as I thought it would. I hope you get what I mean nonetheless.

edited 31st Mar '17 12:45:23 PM by ilili

Thanks everyone. I'll keep writing. I'm sure that statistically at least a few people will like my ideas.

edited 1st Apr '17 8:27:13 PM by Everdream

There's a word for a writer who assumes that his ideas are automatically good enough, and the word is "bad writer"

To be an author, you need an idea to write about, and you need the skill to write it. Skill is the easy part, there are countless classes that you could take and forums that you could frequent for learning to get better.

For ideas: if you have a story idea in your head that you love because you're the one who came up with it, then it's probably not a good idea. If you come up with an idea that you love so much that you wish somebody else had beaten you to it and written it first so that you could be reading it right now, then you know it's an idea worth writing about

My favorite method for coming up with a good idea is to come up with the opposite of a bad idea: I find an idea that I don't like – either in fiction or in the real world – and I see how many scenarios I can come up with which demonstrate what it is about the idea that makes it wrong.

It has been my observation that people who say, "I'm not clever; I'm not smart enough" aren't giving themselves enough credit. They're probably smarter than they realize.

It's the people who think they're really smart, but in fact are as dumb as a box of rocks, who need to have the proverbial anvil dropped on their heads.

edited 27th May '17 7:57:57 AM by pwiegle

I drop it and come back later, preferably at 4AM when I'm at my most creative.

Write anyway. Write even if you objectively suck. Write until you don't want to write anymore.

That sounds like good advice. Now if I can find what to write about

That is also good advice. Sometimes I feel like I am dumb and I cannot write anything of worth or write on the same level as a Humanities/Literature major. I could be smarter than I think but I want to make sure that I have the write information before I start. This is good advice, thanks.