Whether you’re a new writer or an experienced one, you’re likely familiar with the insidious, internal voice that whispers: you’re not really a writer; your work is no good. Like death and taxes, self doubt comes for us all, particularly if you’re suffering the sting of a recent rejection.
I hope you’ll find comfort in the knowledge that even the most successful writers suffer self doubt. Despite accomplishments, accolades, and adoration, the following authors still felt like phonies.
Neil Gaiman
The first problem of any kind of even limited success is the unshakable conviction that you are getting away with something, and that any moment now, they will discover you. It’s Impostor Syndrome—something my wife Amanda christened the Fraud Police.
–Commencement Speech at the University of the Arts Class of 2012
Joyce Carol Oates
© 2014 Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Each day is like an enormous rock that I’m trying to push up this hill. I get it up a fair distance, it rolls back a little bit, and I keep pushing it, hoping I’ll get it to the top of the hill and that it will go on its own momentum. I’m very deeply inculcated with a sense of failure for some reason. And I’m drawn to failure. I often write about it, and I’m sympathetic with it I think, because I feel I’m contending with it constantly in my own life.
Flannery O’Connor
Flannery O’Connor in 1952. (APIC/Getty Images)
Dear God, I am so discouraged about my work. I have the feeling of discouragement that is. I realize I don’t know what I realize. Please help me dear God to be a good writer and to get something else accepted.
Franz Kafka
Wikimedia Commons
Such fear of writing always expresses itself by my occasionally making up, away from my desk, initial sentences for what I am to write, which immediately prove unusable, dry, broken off long before their end, and pointing with their towering fragments to a sad future.
William Goldman
Public Domain
Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.
John Steinbeck
Public Domain
“I am not a writer. I’ve been fooling myself and other people.”
“I am assailed by my own ignorance and inability. … Sometimes, I seem to do a little good piece of work, but when it is done it slides into mediocrity.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Wikimedia Commons
“When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Wikimedia Commons
“All my life, I’ve been frightened at the moment I sit down to write.”
Cheryl Strayed
© 2012 Larry D. Moore. Licensed under CC BY 4.0
“Writing is always full of self-doubt, but the first book [Torch] is really full of self-doubt, and it was much more of a struggle to keep the faith. By the time I wrote Wild, I was familiar with that feeling of doubt and self-loathing, so I just thought, ‘Okay, this is how it feels to write a book.’”
Maya Angelou
Getty Images
“I have written 11 books but each time I think ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”
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