Why You’re a Better Writer Than You Think You Are
As a developmental editor and book coach, I get to help writers breathe life into that story idea that came out of nowhere and won’t let them go. It’s a privilege and a joy to do this work, and I’m so grateful.
Often, as I work with them on honing the skills they need to tell the story they want to tell, the way they want to tell it, something curious happens. Their confidence in their story, and in themselves, drops. I see it again and again. Their brows knit, their shoulders hunch as the story they thought was pretty good suddenly looks like the worst, most predictable, most tropey thing ever written. Despair seeps into them. Some variation of Why did I think I could do this? runs on repeat in their minds. They contemplate quitting.
Now, from where I sit, they’re constantly improving with every deadline. They’re learning to get interiority on the page, to wrangle backstory, to worldbuild with purpose. They’re starting to understand the link between internal arc of change and plot. Master cause-and-effect storytelling. They’re deepening their skill set as they’re deepening and developing their story. But no matter what I say, no matter how much evidence of improvement I present them, they don’t feel good about this progress. And I get it. Because I’ve been there, too. Then I picked up Tiffany Yates Martin’s The Intuitive Author and read about the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is the tendency to overestimate your skill in the early stages of learning something new, and then underestimate your skill as your knowledge grows. Yates Martin writes,
“Imagine a simple graph where the y-axis is confidence and the x-axis is knowledge. According to the Dunning-Kruger scale, initially people overestimate their knowledge of a topic and thus have higher confidence. As their knowledge grows they understand the complexity of the subject much more deeply and realize how much they don’t know. Their confidence decreases even as their knowledge increases.
The reality, though, is that at this point you know much more about writing than you did when you first sat down to pound out a yarn. You are undoubtedly a much better writer now than you were when you started, or five years ago, or five months ago, or even five days ago. The more you learn, the better you get. And the more you realize how much there is still to learn. You’ve moved along the x-axis of knowledge but dropped on the y-axis of confidence.” (pp. 135-136)
She sums it up this way: “…it’s when we genuinely start to get good at this that we may feel the least good about it.”
Let’s call this drop in confidence what it really is: Imposter Syndrome. Those niggling thoughts of doubt convincing us that we’re no-good, incompetent frauds, despite some clear signs of success.
Typically, we’re told we need to Beat Imposter Syndrome! Banish it! Kick it to the curb! But what if, instead of trying to beat imposter syndrome or ignore it or be brought to a grinding halt by it, we embraced it? What if we looked at Imposter Syndrome as evidence that we’re learning and growing and improving as writers?
What if wrestling with Imposter Syndrome is a good sign?
Let me be clear: Imposter Syndrome never, ever feels good. But if you let those feelings blind you to the progress you are, in fact, making every time you sit down to write, you’ll never start to climb back up that y-axis. And you will start to climb back up that y-axis, if you keep at it. Here’s Yates Martin again:
“At some point after your confidence is initially shaken, you begin to regain it as your knowledge and skill in your subject deepen…Your confidence may never get back to the stratospheric levels of your naïve little baby author days, but it doesn’t have to. Dunning-Kruger reminds us that the reason we have doubts about our abilities at all is because we’re so much better and more experienced than we once were.” (p. 137)
So if you’re out there, working hard on your story, reading craft books and taking workshops and working with mentors and coaches, and showing up for your story even on the hard days, you are becoming a better writer, even if it doesn’t feel like it. And the next time you hunch under the weight of discouragement and start thinking, Why did I think I could do this?, see it as a sign of progress.
I’m rooting for you!
Till next time…
Happy writing,
Erin
