If you have self-esteem issues, writing about imposter’s syndrome is oxy-moronic because it presumes one has accomplished something in the first place. Complaining about it is humble bragging about not taking your own awesomeness seriously. And now you’re begging for sympathy from many who would kill for the rewards you’ve reaped.
It’s hard not to translate this as, ‘please compliment me now.’ And it’s hard for people desperate for their first success to empathize with your inability to feel yours.
But every sale, every market broken into, creates this brief period of relief from imposter syndrome, and it’s how you know you suffer from it. For a few hours or days you feel like a ‘real writer.’ And then the damn imposter thing rushes back in like the tide.
Then… absurdly there’s also survivor’s guilt.
Folks newly validated by the tiny handful of professional short fiction editors desperately what that the validation to be meaningful; at the same time, to embrace it wholeheartedly is to embrace a system that is making about 90% of their writing friends temporarily frustrated, intermittently sad, or consistently miserable.
Here’s a buncha bullets, things to think about, as you wrestle with these two feelings. Here are things to tell the folks not yet at the stage to feel like an imposter. Tell them these things as you turn away from your guilt.
- Your good story is wrong for the market. I have sold a ton of stories to Asimov’s, and still get rejected there. I still write stories she knows aren’t for her readership. How does she know? She gets letters. Responses. Reader polls. She knows her readership better than me. The solution to this is to keep reading the market, if you enjoy it and want to be there. If you don’t, you have nothing to feel bad about. I’ll say it again, read the market. One more time… read the market.
- The market bought six stories just like yours last week. Your stories can be triggered by current events, the way you interpret the event metaphorically is influenced by genre. If we wanna say our work is 30% the moment, 30% genre conventions, and 40% magic secret sauce, you are creating stuff with a 60% overlap with everyone else. A topic, a theme warrants a certain number of stories per issue and no more. Editors may be stocked up.
- You haven’t broken in yet. (This is the hardest to hear.) Magazine editors are always looking for authors because there isn’t much money in shorts so many of their writers move on to novels. But making a living as a novelist is damn hard, and writers can work shorts into busy day job schedules, so lots of people just keep churning out shorts. Editors end up with stables of people whose work they like, who the readership likes, so buying their stuff makes a lot of sense. The reality is, you are competing with hundreds of people for a very small number of ‘new to the magazine’ writer slots.
So. Confront your survivor’s guilt, by helping your fellow writers to act on and believe these bullets! Get them to read the markets they want to be in (especially if you’re publishing there!) Nag them. If they realize their work doesn’t fit? They can stop torturing themselves! Find other markets, or write novels, or indypub or write something different.
The other two bullets can be defeated by brute force. It’s a numbers game, and some are luckier than others, but eventually, you break in, and then, the system is tilted a bit toward you. So. Write more. Submit more. Support your workshop friends to do these last two things, as long as they are doing the first.
The two feelings, imposter’s syndrome and survivor’s guilt are at odds with each other, represent different distortions you must address to prevent them from robbing the joy from your writing life. Having both at once is a sign that both are distorted–they are mutually contradictory.
You aren’t an imposter if your survival is meaningful, non random. There are no lottery winners with imposter’s syndrome. You bought the ticket. You were lucky. That’s all winning a lottery is.
If you want to think your publication is random, you won the lottery, if you want to feel guilty for your success, fine, you can do that, but if you also get imposter’s syndrome, then obviously your brain is fucking with you.
Your happiness really has nothing to do with how much or little you publish, or the fairness or unfairness of publishing. In any possible permutation of success or failure you can feel any number of difficult and negative, and baseless emotions.
Rejection is frustrating, but it in itself doesn’t make you unhappy. You do that to yourself, with your expectations. Success feels good, fleetingly, but you can suck the joy out of that too, with imposter’s syndrome and survivor’s guilt. You are doing that to yourself as well.
I know it sounds stupid, but you have to seek out rational responses to these feelings and study them until you believe them, honor them, remember them, repeat them, challenge your internal voices with them in a litany that eventually diminishes them.
Here’s a link to the different kinds of Imposter Syndrome; identify which type you are and learn how to combat the negative messages you are giving yourself based on your own craziness.
But for me, it’s about paying it forward; helping your fellow travelers, for me, is how I stop worrying about my own Imposter thing, which is why I lay this out here. Your mileage may vary.
To write enough, given your own talents and deficits, to become a successful writer, you must protect your head. Don’t suck it up. Don’t tough it out. Confront this shit. I quit fiction for eighteen fucking years. I’m the expert on how not to think about these things. and if all this seems silly to you, if nothing I have written here connects to the way you think, dear God, count yourself lucky.
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