The Art of the Imposter Syndrome
...Or why we can't compare ourselves to those around us...
By the time you read this, I’ll be off on the road. Not promoting my own book (THE FRIDAY GIRL – an Ellroyesque take on 1970s Dundee – came out in March, and if you fancy some Scottish noir I would encourage you to take a punt on it!) but my wife’s latest – LOVE AND OTHER POISONS
LOVE AND OTHER POISONS by Lesley McDowell is a dark take on a well-known Glasgow crime from the 1800s, in which Madeline Smith poisoned her lover with arsenic and was then found “Not Proven” in the high court in Edinburgh. The question of how she did it has long fascinated people (especially as the popular legend – that she gave him a cup of cocoa containing the poison – is easily disprovable) and Lesley’s take on the crime is nice and twisted… but it’s also about who she became after the trial and why she decided, even after creating a new life in London, to flee to America under a false name…
So, yes, please do buy the book if you can! I think you’re all going to love it!
But for today’s post, I’ve really been thinking about what it means to be a writer. After all, Do Some Damage – of which I was one of the original bloggers way back in the late 2000s – is a collective of writers at various stages of their career. But when Steve asked me to come back, I was initially worried – what would I have to say? Would I, as happened previously, start to miss all the deadlines and forget to blog (which did happen frequently, although was partially due to undiagnosed ADHD, as I have since discovered)?
The fear I had was that I would come back with nothing to say, and talk about a writing process which fell by the wayside as I got distracted by various things. After all, it was an eight year gap between ED’S DEAD and THE FRIDAY GIRL – did this mean I was only a part time writer?
In that period, I was still writing, of course. Lots of projects got started and fell by the wayside. I was also ill, with recurring kidney stones and anxiety levels going through the roof (which led to the aforementioned diagnosis of ADHD) along with various other things. I found that the writing slipped more and more as I did more editing work (My day job is freelance editorial work for various publishers) because it paid frequently and on time. But the more of that I did, the less I wrote.
Was I still a writer?
Or was I going to have to consider that I was a better editor than I was a writer?
Part of this fear came about because so many of my contemporaries were publishing at least a book a year. And here was me, scrapping projects, being filled with doubts, never feeling happy with anything. I felt like an imposter, like I’d lost whatever little talent I had in the first place.
It was a horrible feeling.
So what brought me back?
Sometimes, a change of perspective is what you need. And I got that when I applied, on a whim, to a screenwriting course in Scotland. WRITE4FILM was part of the Scottish Film Talent Network, which is a body designed to help connect and develop Scottish film talent. I’d always been interested in film, and wondered if maybe a change in form could help. I applied on a whim and was shocked to get in.
The course focussed heavily on looking at technique and structure. At pulling apart story and getting to the engine of the narrative. And I began to realise that novelists didn’t talk about this kind of thing so much. A lot of us rely on instinct to tell a story, which seems insane when you start to look at the length of some novels. Instinct is great but can only take you so far. And as an editor, I was already looking at other people’s writing like this, so why wasn’t I examining my own in such detail?
On top of that, I was working with some fabulously talented writers, too. Others on the course included the brilliant Rachelle Atalla, whose screenplay later became her novel, THE PHARMACIST, as well as Liam Bell, who followed a similar trajectory in adapting his pitch for THE SLEEPLESS into prose. Rachelle also produced several short films as a result of the course, as did fellow writer, Leyla Josephine.
Being in this atmosphere reminded me why I loved writing, and while I came away with a screenplay adaptation of one of my novels (which still needs some work, I think!), and a producer wanting to work with me on a TV pitch (we’ll talk about that another day!), I also had a renewed sense of wanting to just write again. Of wanting to step past my fears and write the kind of book I wanted to read.
For years, I’d been talking about writing another crime novel set in Dundee, but this one in the recent past and taking its cue from real crime stories from the city (using them as background rather than the main plot). And this course gave me the confidence to re-examine that pitch and rewrite it. As luck would have it, the initial manuscript went out right at the start of lockdown. But my agent persisted, and of course, the rest as they say is history – THE FRIDAY GIRL found it’s dream editor, and was released this year.
But I kept thinking – what if I can’t write another novel in a year? What if it takes me a long time again to develop and get it right? Doesn’t publishing run on this kind of machine?
But then I thought that while we are focussed on a system of content creation, of speed writing, of getting product out immediately and saturating the market, that’s not the kind of book I dream about reading. Sure, I love a number of these kind of books, and my main passion has always been pulp. But with the creation of art – and all books are art, even the mass produced ones, no matter what anyone tells you – sometimes you have remind yourself that the process takes the time it takes. Every writer is different. Those differences don’t make them any more or any less of a writer than the next person. But they do make that writer unique. And that is something to be prized above everything else.