Imposter Syndrome – The Climb #595

Friday 9^th October 2020

When I first got my agent I suffered terrible imposter syndrome.

I’d submitted to her on a bet. A group of us (many now published names) were lamenting our lack of published books and vowed to all send to agents as a result. I had Black as Knight kicking around and had received some good feedback on it the previous summer from another top tier agent.

So I did what I was supposed to do.

I listed who I thought were the five best agents in the world… and I sent it to them.

But I never expected anyone to pick it up… especially not someone on my dream list.

You’d think that this would be the end of the story, but in reality, I knew I was far from the standard of best selling authors. And it kicked off a very long period of imposter syndrome.

I really had it bad. I felt like I was being judged against the very best whilst still very new and raw. In truth, I was the one judging me. I felt like all my dreams were in front of me – that I was living in a fairytale – and the only thing that could ruin it was my inability to write to the standard I felt that level required.

Of course, I was aware. I knew that I’d got to this stage on merit. I knew that no writer is ever perfect, and especially not a new writer. I was prepared to climb every mountain in front of me. But at the back of my mind was a voice that said “you shouldn’t be here”.

Imposter Syndrome isn’t something I feel I’ve ever got rid of. Neither would I want to – I’d rather undervalue my talent than overvalue it. Instead I negotiated with it.

I tried to develop acute self-awareness. I accepted that there were some things I was good at, some things I was terrible at. I worked hard to get a realistic picture of myself and work on my failings.

I tried to move away from external validation to self-validation based on that self-awareness. Maybe I didn’t need loads of people to continually say my action scenes were great. Instead, I took those comments and used them to come to a conclusion that they were a strength of mine.

But there was plenty I wasn’t good at. Brandon Sanderson’s agent once joked to me that at first Brandon wasn’t great at plotting. I used this as evidence that if there were things I was bad at, I didn’t have to stay bad at them forever. It’s probably why, to this day, I spend so much time studying craft.

Imposter Syndrome is something to be managed rather than controlled. I’m certainly a lot better at managing it than I did but still the odd comment can sometimes throw me a loop.

Which is why today I find myself in a weird position where I feel confident in that I’m a good writer, but questioning whether I can actually tell stories. The former is a logical conclusion, the latter, an emotional one. The comment itself that triggered this was incredibly complimentary, and ordinarily I’d take the massive amount of good out of it. Indeed, I’ve had one or two comments on my work in recent weeks and they’ve not triggered my imposter syndrome, so I don’t know why this has. Picking apart the comment (something I don’t tend to do) I can’t see what specifically has been the trigger– not because I want to find fault with the comment, but because I want to know what has caused this.

I’m self-aware enough that I can see this for what it is, and get it under control before it gets loose. All I can do is continue to be self-aware, and keep plugging on.