Hidey-ho, friends. Pay no attention to what day of the week it is.
Let’s talk about Imposter Syndrome. The Oxford dictionary describes it as “the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills.”
Writers run into this periodically, even famous, best-selling authors. Not necessarily about works of the past, but current works. “Oh, sure,” one might say, “that book is great, but this new book is trash, I’m a hack, it was pure luck that I have gotten anywhere,” etc.
But what I’ve found is…sometimes that feeling is justified?
There have been times where I have written something that has felt like pulling teeth, that feels pedantic and repetitive and uninspired. It feels bad. Just bad. And while most stories do go through a “this is bad and I am a hack” phase (normally in the middle somewhere), sometimes something is truly bad, and when you give it to your betas or your critique group, they do come back and say “oh, no, you’re right, something’s missing, this isn’t working.”
It’s not Imposter Syndrome if you’re right, and it actually is bad, right?
So if you’d asked me last week if I was a good judge of whether my own writing was actually bad, or just me going through the tough phase of the story, I would had said I was pretty good at telling the difference.
However, I spent the last weekend pulling apart and rewriting a chapter in a novel that has traditionally given me trouble (the chapter, not the novel), changing up pretty much the entire thing, and it felt bad. Truly, awfully bad. So when I posted it to my critique group on Monday, I was essentially like “I think I’ve made it worse, I don’t know how to fix it, help.”
And do you know what everyone has said?
It’s fine. Really good in places even. Why am I freaking out about it?
Does this even count as imposter syndrome? Is it imposter imposter syndrome, where imposter syndrome gets blamed for any lack of confidence whether or not actually feeling like an imposter comes into it?
Is this a silly thing to worry about when there’s work to be done?
Oh, I mean, yes, absolutely.
Oh well.
Happy August, friends.