Rules for When You Feel Dumb (the grad student's survival guide)
1	Don't compare yourself to people with different backgrounds. You are not them, and when you think about it, wouldn't want to be them, would you? would you trade your life and experiences for those of these people? I don't think so.
2	Remember all the things that your professors don't know outside of their fields. Jane Tompkins (Warren's dissertation director) has never read Pudd'nhead Wilson. She has no desire to.
3	What does it take to feel good about yourself as a thinker? How much authority do you need? Absolute answers, unquestionable viewpoints are as rare in academia as in any other walk of life. If you want absolute certainty, go into televangelism.
4	"You are free to write the worst junk in America" --Goldberg, Wild Mind. Keep this in mind. The worst junk, not Skip Gates or Fred Jameson, should be your level of comparison and departure, because ...
5	You are a writer. Think of yourself as a writer and not god. When you get caught up in trying to know (and say) everything, you're confusing your role with that of Athena or the omniscient god of bloodless abstract theology or the Oversoul or the ubermench or whatever.
6	Send your imagined critics to the Bahamas. When you imagine and try to anticipate every possible objection to your thought, it stifles your creativity and clouds your thinking. Let that critical review come later. Put your critics on a plane and start serving cocktails immediately; you can write while they're drunk, distracted, and intriguing to sleep with each other.
7	Keep moving. Remember Goldberg's (book on writing) Wild Mind. Do free writings so you can get used to writing that you're not invested in. Every word doesn't have to count. Get comfortable with words that don't.
8	Who are you when you write? Fort Hedges? An impregnable pedant? Who do you want to be? Alive. I want to be alive, and to be alive is to be transitory. This knowledge that I build, this stuff that I produce, it's transitory. No eternal temple, merely me and you, my reader, locked in a momentary dance step that will pass and move on. Other readers, other dance steps. No permanence or security here. That's what living prose is.
9	Think of your writing as dancing, and keep moving those feet. There is no perfect step. There is no set of moves that everyone will adore. You have only your body; if you're going to dance, it's the one you must use. Delight in that body. Delight in your mind. The desire for eternal words, eternal certainty, lack of change--it's a death wish.