Reading time: Less than 1 minute
This is my weekly installment of “writing about writing,” in which I scan the world to find websites, books and articles to help other writers. Today I discuss a blog post about writer envy….
I worked in a newsroom for six years and, trust me, I know insecurity. We all feared the reporter sitting next to us or across from us was better or harder working than we were.
We were all convinced that certain editors “favoured” certain writers and gave them (unjustified) praise and (unspecified) advantages. Once, I heard a story about a reporter who had gone to grab a coffee. When he returned to his desk a “colleague” had deleted his story. Oy!
There are few sentiments more vicious than writer envy. Perhaps that’s why I found Nancy Johnson’s thoughtful take on the subject to be so interesting. In a post on Writer Unboxed, the first-time novelist wrote:
As writers, many of us are naturally sensitive, strongly connected to our emotional selves. Even our fiction provides a roadmap to our psyches and life experiences. When the publishing industry sends us a signal of how our work measures up, it’s not just the worth of our books at stake.
It’s us. Am I good enough?
That’s the endless question we’re all asking ourselves. And that’s real whether you’re languishing in the query trenches or preparing for the launch of your debut or publishing your sixth book. And it batters you emotionally if you let it.
Writer envy is not an emotion anyone should want to wallow in. So how do you deal with it? Johnson describes a friend who set the following goal for herself for 2020: to rejoice in the successes of other authors. In fact, the writer keeps that message on a Post-it-note stuck to her computer so she can see it every day.
If you find yourself being swallowed up by writer envy, remind yourself of why you started writing in the first place. Was it to become famous and win awards? Or was it because you had something important to communicate?
