For a long time, I didn't know any other serious writers. But lately, as I've met more and more working writers, I've begun to realize how many of us struggle with a parallel issue: our authority to write. Our problem might be summed up like this: "Why should I, regular ignorant person, presume that I have anything to say about [insert complicated subject here]?"

The complicated subject, in my case, is the western literary canon. For other people, the subject might be anything from "men," to "the wilderness," to "Christianity." And what's at stake, I think, is the surrender of our modesty.

Of course, modesty can reveal itself in more than one way. In college, I didn't fret much about taking a work-study job as an art-class model (though I was way too bored and fidgety to be any good at it). But I wouldn't have dreamed of writing a personal essay about how much I loved the novels of Dickens. It took me 20 years even to make a first attempt.

Modesty can be a stand-in for innocence. It can also be a stand-in for fear and embarrassment. And it can also mask arrogance, which artists have in spades. But naturally, nice, well-meaning people shouldn't be arrogant, and so we don't write about the big subjects because then people will find out what jerks we really are.

So we're modest. And then what we need to write doesn't get written. So then we try to write. And then we hide our heads in our hands and say, "What have I done?" And then we peek out from behind our hands and say, "I don't know. Maybe that went okay after all."

For instance, here's Charlotte Gordon's latest blog post.