When I was younger, one of the many things I thought I wanted to be was a knight. I swung an invisible sword and pretended to be Kayley from Quest for Camelot. I devoured Tamora Pierce’s Protector of the Small quartet. And I knew Bowen’s oath from Dragonheart by heart.
“A knight is sworn to valor. His heart knows only virtue. His blade defends the helpless. His might upholds the weak. His word speaks only truth. His wrath undoes the wicked.”
I even hinted, strongly, that I wanted to attend a certain summer camp that taught kids basic swordsmanship, chivalry, and heraldry. I never did go, and I never did get knighted, either. (Might still happen though, eh, Queen Elizabeth?) But I never lost the driving force behind my interest in knighthood—the desire to be brave. Instead of a sword, I wield a pen. Rather than facing dragons in their dens, my battlefield is a blank page—my opponents, my own inner demons. They feed on my fears, and aren’t slain quite so easily as a living, breathing beast.
As Profound Journey blogger Karen Hume eloquently illustrated in a similar post back in May, a memoir writer’s greatest fear tends to be that their words will say too much about, and thus bring harm to, people whom they care about. On the other hand, we fiction writers tend to fear that we will reveal too much about ourselves—either some uncomfortable truth we wished to keep hidden, or worse, that we really aren’t cut out for this writing thing after all. And it seems no one is immune—even bestselling authors report suffering from imposter syndrome.
Mental Quicksand: Imposter Syndrome
Imposter syndrome is the burden of secretly believing you’re not good enough, that your work will never be worth reading—that your entire identity as a writer is a sham and that one day, someone is going to call your bluff. It’s a voice in your head, whispering (perhaps in Rufus Sewell’s voice, a la A Knight’s Tale) that, “You have been weighed. You have been measured. And you have been found wanting.”
No matter what awards you’ve won or acclaim you’ve received, you can’t help feeling like you’re undeserving, like you’re somehow tricking people into thinking your writing is better than it is. It can happen to any writer, regardless of format or genre—in fact, it can happen to anyone. Yet fiction writers seem especially prone to it, as if we’re all afraid that “making things up and writing them down” (as Neil Gaiman once described it) isn’t a “real job” and that eventually, our readers will figure that out and drop us like hot potatoes.
What we forget is that it doesn’t matter. That’s right, I said it: it doesn’t matter whether your writing is good or bad or so out there that no one understands it. Why? Good and bad are subjective. There’s no accounting for taste. And it’s far less productive to waste time judging your art by other people’s standards when you could be creating art instead. Imposter syndrome is a quicksand trap that can suffocate you, if you let it. Criticizing your writing as your writing it will only make you self-conscious and hesitant, and it will show in your writing, creating a self-fulfilling cycle of doubt and lackluster writing.
Truth in Fiction: The Fear of Digging Too Deep
In The Lord of the Rings, the dwarves of Khazad-Dum “delved too greedily and too deep” and awoke a monstrous creature known as the Balrog. While fiction writers rarely run that particular risk, it is true that we face a similarly perilous task: that of digging down deep into our hearts and souls and mining for words instead of mithril. The risk, of course, is that we’ll dig too deep and unearth something we’d rather keep buried.
And yet, all the greats will tell you that truth is the secret ingredient of good fiction. The phrase “write what you know” doesn’t necessarily mean writing about cats because you know everything there is to know about cats (though, personally, there’s always room for more cats on my bookshelves). It means taking different parts of yourself—your interests, your experiences, and of course your deepest, darkest secrets—and throwing them in the creative blender to see if you can make them into something palatable.
As Elizabeth Gilbert once explained during an episode of her Magic Lessons podcast, fiction writing can actually reveal more about you than a memoir. Memoir writing, after all, is a conscious effort; easy to censor or curate as you please. When writing fiction, on the other hand, you may lay bare all sorts of things and never notice until some keen-eyed reviewer points them out for the world to see—and by then, of course, it’s too late to take it back.
Overcoming Imposter Syndrome and Other Writing Fears
Ultimately, both imposter syndrome and the fear of revealing too much both become barriers to writing only when we waste energy thinking about them, instead of thinking about what to write next. Like Freddy Krueger, they only have the power to stop us because we give them that power by letting the fear take us over.
So don’t think. Write. Try freewriting. Journal—you can even buy one with a lock on it, if it makes you feel better. Participate in NaNoWriMo, or set a goal of writing one quick flash fiction story every day for a week, a month, or a year. Write for yourself, and only yourself, for a while. Write until you forget about the doubts and the secrets and the judgment and the fear.
Write like a knight—bravely and honestly. And whenever the fears start to creep back in under the door and through the crack in the window, look down at them, look them right in the eye, and tell them, “You have been weighed. You have been measured. And you have been found wanting.”
Then turn around and get back to writing.
