Divination and Confidence
Felix Fontaine, The Golden Wheel Dream-book and Fortune-teller (1862; Project Gutenberg, 2019), https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/60045/images/i_frontis.jpg.
November! It used to be NaNoWriMo for writers all over the world. For years I told myself that next year, I’d do it, but I never did. When I first heard about it, I was working as a professor, then I was working as an archivist, and then I was working in tech and the month slipped by every year with no words written. The problem wasn’t time; at least, it wasn’t after I left my work as a history professor. It was confidence.
Not confidence in the sense of feeling like I’ll immediately churn out beautiful prose, but confidence to write and share what I write even though I’m a beginner.
NaNoWriMo might be gone, but this year I’m participating in my own way: my goal for November is to finish the first draft of my novel. AnnoWriMo. For now, confidence is something I’ll practice, because I’d rather be writing scared than not writing.
Around the Web for Writers
Podcasts
Some writing podcasts I listen to regularly and find helpful and insightful:
Book Recommendations from October
Why Can’t I Just Enjoy Things, Pierre Novellie, 2025
Eiger Dreams, John Krakauer, 2019
Under the Whispering Door, TJ Klune, 2023
A Spindle Splintered, Alix E. Harrow, 2021
Silver and Lead, Seanan McGuire, 2025
Funny Story, Emily Henry, 2024
The Guest List, Lucy Foley, 2021
Phantasmagoria
I went to Phantasmagoria night at Duke Homestead this year, and the walk to and from the event was my favorite part. To get to the old homestead, you took a lantern-lit path through a small stand of pines, and to get back to the visitor center, you took a path lined with tealights across a grassy clearing. It was lovely.
Outside the old buildings, there were stations where people in period clothes ran 19th century divination parlor games and a shadow show. Inside the main house there were craft demonstrations of hair jewelry in one room, beetle wing embroidery in another, and live bugs in the last room (I didn’t go in that one).
For a subdued kind of spooky Halloween atmosphere, it really worked.
Phantasmagoria Night © 2025 by Ann Cooper is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
When I got home, I went looking for 19th century guides to popular divination and Project Gutenburg didn’t let me down.
The Golden Wheel Dream Book and Fortune Teller has a guide to fortune telling with cards, dominoes and dice, dream interpretation, and the Golden Wheel.
How to Tell Fortunes is another book of games and divination that has Napoleon’s Oraculum (a kind of paper magic 8 ball), lucky and unlucky days, and weather omens.
A weather omen: “If there be a change of the wind from the north-west or west, to the south-west or south, or else from the north-east or east, to the south-east or south; wet.” Simple! I think we can all parse that, right?
Confidence and Tolerating the "Taste Gap"
I’m a late arrival to social media in that I haven’t shared the results of my creative efforts before. Not that this is the first time I’ve ever shared anything on social media; when I was training to work as an archivist, I took my turns posting to an account run by Wilson Library. Then when I went to work at William & Mary, I started a Tumblr account for our special collections.
Posting to those accounts didn't feel nerve-wracking because I was sharing pieces from the collections or our work with born digital archives. It was part of my job, and it showcased things of straightforward professional interest. Whatever judgements people might have had about what I posted didn't feel like they were about me. If people liked what I shared, that was good, and if nobody noticed, that was okay, too.
What I’m doing now feels more fraught because it’s more personal. Obviously, it’s still good if people like it and still okay if it’s not very interesting, but the experience of sharing is different. I'm at least a little nervous every time I post something—even to Bluesky, where I mostly share photos.
I like sharing my photos, and sometimes I take photos that I'm happy with, but photography is just a hobby, and it's easier to share something that I don't feel like I need to be an expert in before I can participate.
It’s funny how it can be clear that something is an issue of perspective and that a mindset shift is the answer, and yet the issue persists! Not complicated doesn’t mean not challenging.
There’s a feeling I think many of us have that there's some level of expertise we must reach before we can openly share what we’re making. There's not! But the fear of seeming foolish and/or definitely being foolish is a significant obstacle to showing up with our work in public.
I have no good ideas about making the fear easier to get past other than practice. Maybe it's just something that is and will continue to be difficult. We can let it hold us back, or we can share things and know that it's okay to look/be silly, or clumsy, or whatever else, either on purpose or accidentally.
Does everyone know about the advice from Ira Glass about creative work? It must be one of the most-loved pieces of advice for creative people. It’s about the inevitable experience of creating things that don’t live up to our ambitions and don’t satisfy our artistic tastes.
Here’s a blog post from The Marginalian with the full quote and a really wonderful short video that illustrates it. If it’s been a while since you heard the advice, this is a good time to go listen again.
I’ve also found both Show Your Work! by Austin Kleon and On Confidence from The School of Life helpful in thinking about creativity and confidence.
Here’s to everyone creating in the taste gap—let’s go write.