Aspiring Authors, Don't Worry About Your Jitters

The Internet Review of Science Fiction gets on the phone with Clive Barker, who hasn't let decades of success completely destroy that nagging fear at the back of every writer's mind:

Of course, there are days when you feel a little more confident and up, but there are days when I'm showering, thinking about the work ahead, and having strong doubts about it. It's not that I don't like doing it—I do like doing it—but I want to do it at the top of my game. One of the reasons why I have moved consistently from one area of the fantastic—the world of horror—to the creation of fantastic worlds, Weaveworld, Imajica, etc., and then into illustration and fantasy for children, and a few more things that have come down the pipe, and which have gone superbly. None of the reasons I've done that is to keep that challenge going, to always have that doubt in myself in the morning, because that's part of what makes the work good. I don't want the blood to dry through repetition. When we put the first Abarat book out a couple of years ago, I was absolutely as anxious as I was when I first put out a book twenty years before, because it's a new area for me, and my inspiration might be misled, and who knows what people would say? I think, for me, and I can only speak for myself, the elements of the subgenres have a way in which they keep me on my toes.

To that end, he completely overhauled the second volume in the Abarat quartet after looking at the galley proofs and deciding that it was all wrong, thus throwing out a year's worth of work.