"That bedrock faith that I could write was what blinded me to attempts to discourage me"
About this Quote
The line runs on a paradox: the same certainty that makes an artist possible also makes them selectively deaf. Abbey’s “bedrock faith” isn’t the flimsy optimism of a pep talk; it’s geological, formative, almost pre-rational. By framing belief as bedrock, she implies it’s not something you argue yourself into. It sits under everything, steady enough to let you keep producing pages when the world offers rejection slips, snide workshop comments, or the quieter sabotage of being underestimated.
“Blinded” is the mischievous pivot. She’s not claiming saintly perseverance; she’s admitting to a useful flaw. Blindness usually reads as vulnerability, but Abbey flips it into armor: discouragement can’t land if you can’t fully see it. The subtext is that talent alone isn’t the decisive factor - attention is. To write is to decide what gets access to your mind. Abbey suggests that early survival in a creative life may require a kind of strategic delusion, a narrowed field of vision where the work stays luminous and the noise becomes scenery.
Context matters: a woman building a career in genre fiction across decades when gatekeeping was both explicit and casual. “Attempts to discourage me” hints at active resistance, not merely self-doubt. The sentence carries the wry implication that discouragers exist in plural, and that their efforts were, from her vantage point, almost comically irrelevant. Abbey’s intent isn’t to romanticize struggle; it’s to credit a stubborn internal permission slip - the one that lets the work continue long enough for the world to catch up.
“Blinded” is the mischievous pivot. She’s not claiming saintly perseverance; she’s admitting to a useful flaw. Blindness usually reads as vulnerability, but Abbey flips it into armor: discouragement can’t land if you can’t fully see it. The subtext is that talent alone isn’t the decisive factor - attention is. To write is to decide what gets access to your mind. Abbey suggests that early survival in a creative life may require a kind of strategic delusion, a narrowed field of vision where the work stays luminous and the noise becomes scenery.
Context matters: a woman building a career in genre fiction across decades when gatekeeping was both explicit and casual. “Attempts to discourage me” hints at active resistance, not merely self-doubt. The sentence carries the wry implication that discouragers exist in plural, and that their efforts were, from her vantage point, almost comically irrelevant. Abbey’s intent isn’t to romanticize struggle; it’s to credit a stubborn internal permission slip - the one that lets the work continue long enough for the world to catch up.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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