How do you climb out of a creative slump and self-doubt? Right after graduating, Utsudo’s family didn’t believe in her, and she could only prove herself by writing relentlessly. Years later, financial pressure and comparing herself with others left her lost again—until she heard Mayday’s 〈倔強〉 (“Stubborn”), the song that had carried her through her lowest days, live at a concert and realized she’d lost her way once more. Her answer: stop comparing yourself to others, reconnect with the self who first loved creating, and rather than live with regret, take on the challenge again.

Translated from Utsudo’s original Chinese column.

This is a song by Mayday that carried me through the hardest days of my life.

A big gamble no one believed in after graduation

Readers of earlier Ghost Island posts probably know I’ve stumbled all the way here. Every time it looked like I was finally climbing up, something would come along and push everything back down, so for a long time I stayed stuck somewhere in the middle.

I remember the days right after I graduated from university. I barely told friends or family (especially relatives) that I wanted to try making it in fiction. The big publisher I’d signed with during school had dropped me without publishing anything, yet I still made a deal with my family: “If I don’t publish a commercial work within a year, I’ll give up.”

Making such a big gamble, I was actually very anxious and scared. But every morning I got up and sat at the computer to write until bedtime. Apart from eating, bathing and sleeping, all my time went into typing every word and sentence.

But my family started quietly asking around about job opportunities for me. When I heard about it secondhand from relatives, I was really discouraged. We’d made that agreement only a month or two earlier, and they didn’t believe in me at all… maybe they just saw me as a shut-in who didn’t want to find a job.

The distrust from others and the feeling of having nowhere to turn built up. After that, I found I could trust people less and less. Everyone says one thing politely and does another, so rather than spend time explaining myself, it was faster to take everything on and do it myself.

Only results can prove your determination

Only results could shut these people up. Only results could prove my determination.

I know I’m definitely no genius in this field, and I have no outside resources. I just love it, so I write every story from dawn till dusk, wanting to prove something or leave something behind.

Back then I thought: I can’t precisely control the quality of my work, and I don’t understand commercial trends. So I’ll write like crazy—two books a month—and win through quantity, doing everything I can to raise my chances of getting signed.

During that time I also fell into endless self-doubt. In a tunnel with no light, I didn’t know whether the slump would ever end, or whether a cliff was waiting for me.

In an environment so unfriendly to creators, was this persistence a trial I had to endure, or a flame that would eventually burn itself out?

Lost again, and comparing myself with others

Fast-forward to now. Recently I fell into a similar confusion again. Thinking about it, I seem to start doubting myself every so often, probably out of a lack of confidence.

It feels like I’m worse than everyone at everything. As time goes on, the people around me achieve more and more while I stay in place. I’ve become more and more fixated on the “results” of each action, using them to measure whether my efforts are “worth it,” and when I don’t see much of a future, I fall into self-doubt again.

It’s been especially bad lately. Maybe because I can clearly feel how fast the world is changing, how uncertain the future is, and how the financial pressure is coming into focus. My vision narrowed again, as if I’d fallen into a hunter’s trap where every struggle leads to a dead end.

So I began losing my passion for things around me and started calculating gains and losses, scrambling to get something but never getting the point, so tired I wanted to give up on everything.

The Mayday concert and 〈倔強〉

Amazingly, a friend unexpectedly got two tickets and invited me to a Mayday concert.

I remember that during my earlier slump, the song 〈倔強〉 (“Stubborn”) kept me company through those lonely days. When I heard it live again, with the lyrics projected on the screen, it shook my heart once more.

Yes—it was this stubbornness that let me hold on in what seemed like a hopeless situation and carve out a path of my own. That persistence and belief once felt so natural. How could I have forgotten?

In that moment it hit me: I’d lost my way again.

In a creative slump, find your original self

I’d become too fixated and tangled up, forgetting what mattered most. Where did the me who loved writing so much—who felt wrong all over if she didn’t write for a day—go? When did I stop being happy?

A work directly reflects the author’s state of mind. Writing just to get it done and creating with passion produce completely different results. Yet I kept asking myself why I couldn’t do anything right, why I couldn’t write bestselling masterpieces like others. Was I really just less skilled?

But when I think about it, weren’t those people also immersed in their own worlds, weaving their dreams word by word? How long did they brew in obscurity before breaking out of the cocoon in such splendor?

What right does someone lost, only counting gains and losses, and made narrow-minded by comparison, have to be jealous of others’ achievements?

Everyone’s life and circumstances simply can’t be compared. What I have, others may not; what others have, I may never get. Something I don’t care about may be something others long for, and vice versa. So why do people always compare like this?

So I’ve decided to find myself again.

To take on the challenge again as my original self.

Rather than regret, I think the pain of never trying at all hurts more.

FAQ

Further reading

• Previous: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #119: How to Write a Coherent Plot That Doesn’t Go Off Track
• Start from the beginning: Hey! I Heard You’re a Writer on Ghost Island #01: Utsudo’s Debut — A Road to the Dream Covered in Frost
• Utsudo’s books

About the author

Utsudo is a Taiwanese light novelist and novelist VTuber with more than ten years in the industry and 40 commercially published print books. Her novel 《遺失的情書》 received a 2022 Ministry of Culture youth creative award. The 《嘿！聽說妳在鬼島當作家》 series records her experiences as a novelist in Taiwan.