“Am I a good writer?”
If you are new to writing, there’s a good chance this question leaks into your thoughts on a daily, perhaps hourly basis. You hand in that finished piece to your teacher, submit a story to a publication, or paste the first sentence of your novel in a #FirstLineFriday forum and then wait, breath bated, for feedback that will answer this question.
Well, I’m here to tell you that if you are asking this question, there’s a good chance you are a much better writer than you think. Don’t believe me? Well, there’s a good reason for that. Anyone starting out in a new endeavor is likely to experience some doubt in their skills. In this post, I explore the psychological biases that cause you to doubt your writing skills. In the next post, I explore a few inescapable aspects of the publishing industry that only serve to magnify this doubt.
Negativity Bias in the Writer’s Brain
The human brain is hardwired with something called the “negativity bias.” This bias refers to the fact that negative things have a greater impact on our psychological and emotional state than positive things. Put another way, our brains weigh bad information more heavily than good. As a result, the pain from one negative comment is felt stronger than the joy of numerous positive comments. Compliments are kind of like Chinese food, you devour them and an hour later you’re hungry again. Criticisms are like a bad batch of sushi, their sour taste lingers in your memory for hours, days, even years later.
Unfortunately, the writing industry is structured so that you are much more likely to receive bad feedback. Rejections are the norm; acceptances are the rarity. In his book On Writing, Stephen King tells how as a young writer he speared each rejection letter received on a nail in the wall. “By the time I was fourteen, the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it.” How did he cope with this barrage of negative feedback? “I replaced the nail with a spike and went on writing.”
Take a cue from Uncle Stevie, accept rejection as part of the process but don’t make the mistake of interpreting that rejection as evidence that you are a bad writer. Remember, your brain is designed to make that very interpretation, but fight it off and keep on writing.
Negativity Bias in the Reader’s Brain
Negativity bias doesn’t just impact the writer’s brain, it impacts the reader’s brain too. If someone buys your book on Amazon and hates it, there’s a good chance they’re going to leave a bad review. But the readers who loved your book? The majority of them will quietly enjoy it and you will never hear from them.
The negativity bias in our brains produces a negativity bias in our reviews. Always keep this in mind when you are checking reviews of your own work and make your psychological adjustments accordingly. Or do what some writers do and just skip reading reviews of your work altogether.
Unrealistic Social Comparisons
Let’s say you want to assess your ability to make a free-throw shot. Would you compare your performance to Stephen Curry? Or would you compare it to someone who is comparable to you in terms of age, height, and experience level? To get the most accurate assessment of your current skill level, you would be smart to choose the latter.
But I’m guessing this isn’t the strategy you take when assessing your writing ability. You compare your writing to that of your favorite author who’s probably been writing longer than you have been alive! Or you compare yourself to writers with far more training and mentoring than you currently have. If you only compare your skill level and your successes to the elite writers, you are going to walk away feeling like a failure. The same would be true if you judged your free-throw skills by only comparing them with NBA superstars.
Stop comparing yourself to best-selling authors and superstar writers. Start comparing yourself to writers who match you in terms of experience in their writing career. Or better yet, learn to appreciate that as different artists with different skills, comparison may not be a fruitful endeavor at all. Trust your skills and improve on your weaknesses. Try and be a better writer than you were before — that’s your comparison.
Know Your Worth
Rejection is arguably the most painful part of being a writer, but it doesn’t have to be. To understand why this is the case, consider the Buddhist parable of the second arrow. According to this teaching, every time we experience misfortune, two arrows fly at us. The first arrow is the actual negative event. The second is our reaction to that event. The second arrow is the one that causes greater suffering, and that is especially unfortunate since the second arrow is the one that can actually be avoided. For example, your significant other breaks up with you and that hurts. But it will hurt even more if you interpret this breakup as proof that you are unlovable and destined to be alone.
Now let’s apply this principle to writing. The rejection itself isn’t really that painful (first arrow), rather it is the meaning that your unconsciously attach to the rejection (second arrow) that causes you the most pain. You interpret rejection as a sign that your story or poem isn’t a good one, or worse, that you are not a good writer in general. Remember, all a rejection means is that this specific piece did not 100% convince a specific editor to publish your work in a specific outlet. That’s it. See how less painful that interpretation feels?
When Stephen King was a burgeoning author, he literally threw his novel Carrie in the trashcan before his wife Tabitha fished it out and convinced him it was worth continuing. We all know how that story turned out, which means that Tabitha had a more accurate assessment of the novel than Stephen. Don’t fall prey to this same confidence trap. If you want to be a writer, commit to it, work hard to improve your skills, and know that each project you finish, each piece of feedback you receive, each rejection you accumulate, is honing your skills and making you a better writer, even if at times it doesn’t feel that way.
By making this mental shift, you can welcome rejections (or at the very least endure them) rather than use their barbed points to pierce holes in your confidence.
For more advice on how you can use psychological science to improve your writing skills, boost your creativity, and blast through writer’s block, see my other posts.
