I have a pretty good grasp on what I'm good at as a writer. My grammar is good, my sentences are varied, and I can write from sentence to sentence very well. I'm also overflowing with fun and original premises, and my fans often request sequels. All is good and life is easy, right? Wrong! No, I am beset with uncertainty and insecurity.
It's the stuff in between the top and bottom levels that tend to get me. I worry whether I'm writing emotionally impactful scenes and whether my characters come across as genuine. I worry that I'm writing like a storytelling robot.
For instance, take my ongoing novel, Visions of Dark & Light. It has what I thought was some of my best writing and best characterization. It's a joy to write and the chapters just flow off the keyboard (I wrote about 140k words of it in about six weeks). However, it has about 1/5 the readership of my more popular stories and the reader response, while positive, has been depressingly anemic. Maybe it's just because it's a different genre, but I'm terrified that I'm writing a boring story that people quickly tune out from.
I also worry whether the fact that I'm on the spectrum has anything to do with it. I'm much more attuned to some details than the average person and far less attuned to others. For instance, I'm much more likely to write about somebody's emotional behavior ("he clenched his fists") than I am about their internal emotions ("anger rose up in him like an acid") when describing intense scenes, and I can only gauge my own reaction to my story and compare it to how I feel about the works of other authors. So I worry that the emotional content I'm conveying is, essentially, being written by somebody (me) who isn't a fluent speaker of that language. Does that make any sense?
