On Doubt: A Two-Part Journal Entry

Part One: The Comparison Trap

There’s a particular kind of doubt that doesn’t sound like doubt at all. It sounds like discernment. It shows up not as “is this story any good,” but as “is this story as good as the other one?” And because it wears the costume of quality control, it’s easy to mistake for a healthy instinct instead of what it actually is: a way of avoiding the harder question.

I’ve noticed this in myself lately. Finishing an outline for one book and, almost immediately, holding it up against another. Not to learn from it. Not to see what one might teach the other. To rank them. Which one is stronger. Which one deserves more of my attention, more faith, more of whatever finite belief I have to spend on a project before the drafting gets hard.

The trouble is that this instinct assumes something false at its root. That all novels are competing for the same prize. That there’s a single scoreboard, and every book I write either climbs it or falls behind. But a psychological mystery thriller and a folkloric ghost story aren’t running the same race. They’re not even in the same stadium. Comparing them for “which is better” is like asking whether a hammer is better than a level—the question only makes sense if you’ve already forgotten what each one is for.

Take two of the projects I’ve been living inside recently: The Five and What Walked the Boreen. On the surface, there’s real overlap—both are mysteries. Both have a woman rebuilding a life after damage. Both have a community protecting old secrets. If I squint, I can make them sound like the same book pitched twice. And that’s exactly the moment the doubt gets loudest, because if they’re “the same,” then one of them must be the redundant one. The weaker cousin. The version I didn’t need to write.

But that squinting is the trap. It flattens two stories that are actually doing very different work, built on different engines, aimed at different effects on a reader. The doubt isn’t telling me the truth about either book. It’s telling me that I’ve stopped looking at them closely enough to see what makes them distinct—and comparison always gets easier the less carefully you’re looking.

So the real problem isn’t “which one is better.” The real problem is that I’ve been asking a ranking question when I should be asking a specificity question: what is the story, on its own terms, trying to do—and is it doing that?

That reframe is the whole subject of Part Two.