Like many writers, I suffer from impostor syndrome, lack of self-confidence, and a constant am-I-good-enough anxiety. Every now and then I hit a major milestone—a short story acceptance to a magazine, a full manuscript request from an agent—and for a few days, my affliction subsides. Then, once the excitement of this external validation wears off, it’s back to feeling inadequate and insecure.
But around the start of 2018, I experienced a new kind of validation. I had just finished several short stories, and it occurred to me that not only were they good, they were significantly, consistently better than my previous attempts. Instead of being nervous about submitting them to publications, I was excited.
More importantly, I was seeing real, tangible improvement in my writing skills. My efforts were beginning to pay off. And if I could improve that much in a few years, think of what I could do in a decade!
Suddenly I felt like, even if I hadn’t made it as a writer yet, I was on course to do so. Suddenly, I was good enough—not for an agent, editor, or critique partner, but for myself. And you know what? That validation didn’t wear off after a few days, or even a few weeks. It still hasn’t worn off. I feel like a real writer now. I feel worthy.
Although it isn’t something you can add to your resume, validating yourself is one of the biggest milestones of your writing career. It gives you the self-confidence and self-worth you need to keep going in the face of rejection. It gives you confidence in your own work, and that confidence will shine through in your writing and make it even stronger.
External validation is important, too, but it’s transient. An editor who loves your first story may reject the next one. A publishing house may go under, forcing you to start over. If you tie your self-worth to an external source of validation, you risk crippling disappointment caused by forces beyond your control. Internal validation can’t be taken away from you.
So how do you achieve this sort of validation? It rarely comes easily, and it’s different for every writer. Here are a few things you can do to start validating yourself.
Track your progress. Every now and then, pause to take stock of what you’ve accomplished lately. Maybe you failed to meet a particular goal, but you achieved something else that wasn’t on your list of goals to begin with. You might have taken six months to finish that first draft instead of your planned three, but you didn’t even have a premise, let alone a draft, this time last year. It’s great to aim high, but don’t beat yourself up when you only reach the middle.
Reread your work. You can gauge the quality of your writing by responses from critique partners, prospective agents, and magazine editors, but that’s another source of external validation. Learn to read critically. Study your older writing to identify your major weaknesses, then look at your newer stuff to see how you’ve improved. When you can see those improvements with your own eyes, you’ll be on your way to self-validation.
Learn from everything. Every element of the writing process is a learning experience, and learning is an accomplishment in itself. I know my very first novel (That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named) will never get published, but I still don’t regret writing it. None of my later novels would be anywhere near as good if I hadn’t made all those mistakes—and learned from them—on the first one.
Write. By definition, what does a writer do? Write. So go write! Did you write today? Yes? Good job. Even if you didn’t write as much as you’d hoped, even if none of what you wrote gets published, you still wrote it. So congratulations, you’re a writer. Keep telling yourself that, and eventually you’ll believe it.