Be your own champion

Why you have to stand up for your own work without waiting for other people's permission

Last week I watched a writer quit in real time.

I don’t know her, and I’ve never read her books. I’ve tried to find her Threads post again, without luck. I know that she writes historical fiction, has published several novels and won awards for them, and has received good reviews from prestigious outlets in her genre.

From what I could glean from her post, someone recently wrote a negative review of her book. Not only that, but they called her a “YA author,” which she isn’t.

And instead of licking her wounds, or rallying her followers, or laughing it off and blocking the account, she announced she was done. Pulling her books and never publishing again. She was terrible at this, she claimed, and she wasn’t going to embarrass herself anymore.

I don’t know what happened to her. Maybe she logged off, slept, and woke up embarrassed by the post instead of the books. Maybe a friend talked her down. Maybe she meant every word. But it’s stayed with me for weeks.

She was doing it. The thing a lot of us are grinding away at on lunch breaks and dreaming about at two in the morning—she was actually living inside it. People were reading her work, paying money, turning pages. A few of them didn’t like it, and one of them was rude about it.

That’s the dream working the way it ought to. Once we put our work into the world, people get to have opinions about it—and some of them will be bored, confused, having a bad day, or quietly building a personality out of one-star reviews. Maybe this author was feeling fragile that day, or maybe she was exhausted and burnt out from the grind of doing hard creative work for years with no guarantee. Whatever the reason, she read one stranger’s verdict and believed it over her own.

We are not imposters

For years I wouldn’t call myself a writer: first because I wasn’t published, then because I wasn’t traditionally published or agented, then because I’d only finished one book and Ploughshares had passed on a story. Because, because, because—I had a whole filing cabinet of becauses, each one a small permission slip to not claim the thing I was already doing.

There’s a name for this, and it’s older than most of us think. In 1978, psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes published the first study of what they called the imposter phenomenon—what we now call “imposter syndrome.” They described it as an internal experience of intellectual phoniness: a conviction that you’ve fooled everyone, that persists no matter how much evidence piles up against it.

That last part is the cruel trick. The achievements don’t fix it. You can publish the novels, win the awards, collect the good reviews, and still stand there certain that everyone’s about to find you out. Clance and Imes were studying high-achieving women who couldn’t internalize their own success. Forty-some years later, half the writers I know could have been case studies.

At some point, though, the math stopped working on me. People were reading my work and liking it. Not everyone, and usually not as-is—readers had feedback. But the work was landing. Pieces were getting accepted. The evidence got loud enough that the becauses finally sounded like what they were—a story I’d been telling myself to stay safe.

We have to champion ourselves

If we don’t stick up for our own work—flawed as it is, unfinished as we are, a far cry from the established authors we measure ourselves against—then no one will. Agents and editors and the occasional generous reviewer might champion us, but they can’t be the foundation. They’re not there at 5 a.m. when we’re deciding whether to leave our warm beds and face the unfinished draft. We are the only ones.

“Believe in ourselves” may sound like trite advice. I don’t mean we should wave off criticism and stop trying to get better. Championing our work and being ruthless about improving it aren’t opposites. They’re the same job, done in two different phases. We do the hard work, fix our shit, read it aloud until our eyes blur, and polish it until we can’t make it any better. Then we stand behind it as something we’re proud of, imperfections and all.

In her Dear Sugar column that later became Tiny Beautiful Things, Cheryl Strayed addressed a young writer who wrote in, paralyzed, convinced she couldn’t do it. At the end of her reply, Strayed summarized: “Not like a girl. Not like a boy. Write like a motherfucker.” That’s the permission we need to give ourselves—and that includes the permission to keep going, even when someone poo-poos what we’ve worked so excruciatingly to put into the world. We grow from it, we learn, but above all, we stay in the game.