Most people have “imposter syndrome” at some point. For writers, it’s generally along the lines of, I’m no good at this; when will someone realize it and call me out on it?
I’ve never had that particular type of imposter syndrome—not because I think I’m so good, but because I truly believe good writing can be learned by anyone, and that even the best writers started out not so good. Being not great is simply part of the path, and how long one spends on that part of the journey depends on how hard they work to improve (and that goes for any activity, not just writing).
Two things have always made me feel like an imposter. The first is that I’m not, and never have been, compelled to write. Most writers will tell you they’ve been writing since childhood and could not imagine a life not writing. It’s as much a need as breath. Not me. There are some things I’d like to say to the world, and hope to get them written down, but I’ve never had that urgency or obsession with writing.
To go along with that, I never thought I was destined to write. Think about, say, Thomas Edison buying equipment for chemical and electrical experiments when he was still a child, or Jane Goodall being obsessed with animals as far back as her earliest memories. There wasn’t anything in my life (such as that compulsion mentioned above) to point toward being a writer.
Or so I thought. Recently, I’ve realized there were things. Two things, to be precise.
Neil Gaiman said last night that the thing he’s been most afraid of his whole life is his own imagination. Paraphrasing, because I didn’t record/immediately write it down: I’d be at school and think, what if my parents don’t come home today? Or, what if they come but they only look like my parents, and aren’t? So the thing that’s always scared me the most, is me.
I always had that same imagination, though my dreams could be happy or sad or exciting as well as scary. The phrase most often spoken about me, by far, when I was a kid was, “Teresa’s in a daze again.” (I know this because it was always said when I had to be shaken or poked or something to shift my attention from my imaginary world back to the real one. Which was generally several times a day.) When my imagination took off, the house could burn down around me and I’d never know it. There wasn’t anything wrong with my real world—I actually had a great family and life. But my mind never stayed settled there.
Barbara Taylor Bradford once said, “You can’t be a novelist if you can’t imagine things happening that have never happened; you need to be a really good liar. A novel is a monumental lie that has the ring of truth.”
The most common phrase spoken to me as a kid: “You’re such a liar.”
I didn’t consider myself a liar, even though I knew a clown didn’t ride the bull across the street every night, and there weren’t lions living in the trees behind my house, and I couldn’t fly three nights a month. And I knew the people I told such things to didn’t believe it, either.
But I couldn’t understand why all the books I read were fine, but when I told a story, I was a liar. Maybe if my family had ever used the phrase “telling a story” for a lie, I might have caught on sooner. But we never did. There were stories, and there lies, and it took me a long time to figure out the difference. For years, I was just looking for someone to play along with my stories. No one ever did. I was just a liar.
I’ve learned to give my stories that “ring of truth,” so now instead of being a liar, I can be a writer—as I was, evidently, always meant to be.
Hen Scratches 