Author crazies — we all have them. Fears and worries that — as artists, craftsmen, and business people — drive us a peculiar kind of nuts. One of the biggest crazies, though, is the thought, “I’m the only one thinking this.” One by one we’ll be taking those thoughts out of the back of our brains and showcasing just how universal they are. In this entry, Anna talks about impostor syndrome.
Kat and I wrote Salt and Silver
We’ve been writing the sequel for almost two years. Kat had a baby, I moved across the country, a lot of other life happened. But we know what it’s about. We know who the characters are. We know what the ~~artistic theme~~ is. We know what our creepy-cool twist is, and what makes it all sexy, and what the romance trope we’re turning on its head is. We know the characters’ voices.
Yet we’ve been writing and rewriting and rewriting the same 20,000 words for almost two years. First we wrote it in the first person POV of the hero. Then in limited third person POV for just the heroine, then just the hero, then swapping back and forth. At some point in between there, we changed the plot — twice.
We’ve finally settled on first person from the heroine’s POV — and we’ve got the plot pretty worked out — so now it’s time for us to buckle down and write. Kat’s already done a lot; I’m working on it now. Since she sent me the file, I’ve written five short stories (between two and six thousand words each), edited almost eight hundred thousand words of other people’s work, watched both seasons of Fringe (twice!), both seasons of Southland, Nigella Lawson’s entire oeuvre, and read several million words of novels, nonfiction, fanfic, blog posts… Oh, yeah, and I write two blog posts every day (sometimes three!).
The book’s file sits on my desktop, and I look at it every day. Sometimes I even click on it, open it, write a word or two. Then I am gripped by a paralyzing fear and I close it again.
After all, if Kat and I ever do finish this book, it will be completely obvious to everyone that Salt and Silver was a fluke, that I am not a writer, that I am holding back Kat’s literary genius, and that my computer should be taken away for the good of everyone. Or, almost worse than being a bad writer… it will be discovered that I am a mediocre writer. Not the worst, not the best, always missing that one something that makes characters come alive on the page.
This is, of course, ridiculous. I know I am a good writer. I know there are people who enjoy my writing, that it works on a fundamental level. I know that I can put together an excellent sentence, a compelling scene. I know that I know what my real flaws as a writer are (plot, as anyone who’s read my solo stuff can tell you!), just as I know that sometimes I can actually make my work stronger by writing my flaws into it. I know that Kat will fix whatever missteps I make, just as I fix hers — no ego, no bullshit; I have her back and she has mine.
But I can’t really convince myself of all this. I still sit in front of my computer and think, “Kat should write this book by herself so that I don’t ruin it.”
How to get around this? I still don’t know. I am still paralyzed by these thoughts of my perceived inadequacies. Even telling myself that I am writing my parts of this book for Kat, who loves my writing (as I love hers) doesn’t help.
Friday night, though, as I did my daily staring at the file on my desktop, I thought about when I started writing original fiction again. I’d stopped writing fiction in 2000, when I started working in publishing — and didn’t go back to it until after I’d left my full time job for freelancing. (In between, I wrote hundreds of thousands of words of fanfic, which I found — and continue to find — deeply satisfying.)
In March 2007, one of my friends thought I wasn’t writing enough (fanfic) for her entertainment and she offered to pay me a dollar to write her a one hundred thousand word science fiction novel — “the crappiest science fiction novel you can,” is what she said to me. I wrote 25,000 words of what eventually became Salt and Silver, and the responses of the people I sent it to were wildly varied. Some, like Kat (and the friend for whom I wrote it), really liked it. Others told me that the protagonist (proto-Allie, then completely unnamed) was “unlikeable” — and some other words I won’t reprint.
The response that tickled me the most, though, was from one of my mentors, who pinged me on IM to say, “Great googly mooglies, you really can write.”
When I read those words, I got a rush of wonderful warm sparkly happiness — and reading them now, remembering how good it felt to impress this person whose opinion I thought (and continue to think) very highly of… well, that’s awesome. It makes me feel awesome. It makes me feel like I can do anything.
I also went back and read a bunch of old emails Kat and I exchanged while writing and editing Salt and Silver — that was intensely fun, and rereading those emails reminded me of that. It reminded me that I love writing stuff she’s going to read, because she loves reading it — and the more I write, the more she’s going to write, and I love reading what she writes. It’s a symbiotic relationship of total awesome — and if I don’t write, I don’t get to participate in it.
Finally, I thought about all the other times I thought that if I did something, people would see me for the impostor that I am. Things like taking that job in publishing in the first place, and starting an imprint at age twenty-three, and doing a photo essay for my undergraduate thesis, and working with the expensive, professional audio/visual equipment in college. Learning Greek. Writing articles about the publishing industry, negotiating contracts for hundreds of thousands of dollars, deciding which books should be published. Baking a soufflé. Sewing a quilt, competing in a cartwheel competition, knitting a sweater, partitioning a hard drive using DOS commands.
I don’t know that I’d agree that “the best way out is always through,” or that the only way to handle fear is to stand up to it and bring it into the light of day — but the old adages seem to hold true in this case. The more I write, the better I feel, the easier it is to keep writing, the less I feel like I’m faking it and someone’s gonna call me on it.
All I can do is keep saying, “I can do this” — and then do it.
