Great Writing Days Make Me Feel Even More Like An Impostor

The more days I produce impassioned stories, the more I feel I should be able to always do so, and the more like a fake I feel when most days I still cannot.

When my writing is going really well, there’s nothing better. You know those days. Inspiration strikes early. Your writing flows, seems to organize itself and you don’t have to struggle with figuring out what you want to say. And then once you publish it, before long it is drawing a lot of readers who are making positive comments about it.

We all love those days. Whenever this happens to me, I feel like a million bucks. Well, at least for five minutes anyway. But then the next day, I usually can’t repeat this feat.

Okay, not the end of the world, I tell myself. Take a break, do some marketing, read a bunch of other people’s articles. That usually will give you some inspiration. But nothing seems to do the trick.

Here’s there really strange thing. The more great writing days I have, the more like an impostor I feel. I think that’s because it just feels like a fluke. But shouldn’t it be the other way around? I mean, if I only have a couple of times that I managed to write something that came easily, received a positive response, and I was proud of, then it would make more sense to still feel like an impostor. Those times would have been the exceptions. But when I have a number of good days, even if not making up the majority, that would seem to indicate I have some talent, some potential, that I have something to say that people want to read and will feel enthusiastic about.

Not Seeing the Compound Interest

I think a big part of the problem for me is that I’ve always been someone who can’t go backwards. I am the kind of person who feels that everything should add up and build on what came before. It should always increase incrementally. I needed to see my GPA go up each semester, my dance skills improve, my ability to play harder pieces on the piano grow.

Basically, if I practiced something, I needed to see improvement. But the more areas this occurred in, the less tolerant I was when it didn’t occur. When I tried something, and worked at it and saw no improvement or ability to succeed at it at all, I became so frustrated I sabotaged my efforts, then quite.

The best example of this is bowling. When in school, my boyfriend and I decided it would improve our relationship if we found some common hobbies. We decided to try bowling. To say it was a disaster is an understatement. Every so often I would manage to knock down a few but more often than not I rolled gutter balls. I tried to follow the advice my boyfriend gave, then what neighboring players offered, who I think were feeling sorry for my boyfriend since he had to put up with my worsening mood.

My goal was to break 100. I’m nothing if not persistent, and I insisted on sticking it out until I rolled a decent game. After three games I saw no improvement and after two more, my score started going down from my high of 48. I stopped concentrating and just threw them and the next game was all gutter balls. Then I started throwing gutter balls on purpose. Why bother trying if you get the same result. I quit halfway through the game, heading for another 0 score, and just let my boyfriend bowl both his and my balls. I was in a terrible mood for days and never tried bowling again.

Writing is Not Like Playing the Piano

While there are definitely skills you need to learn to write well, it’s not all a matter of technique. You can have the best skills in the world, and still not write anything that anyone really wants to read.

Each story that was easy to write, which I felt was a good piece of work and which received an excellent response, served to convince me that I was becoming a better writer. But then instead of continuing to write better stories more easily, that received increasingly better responses, I’d feel like I was going backwards for days or weeks at a time.

The number of good days did increase but if I write one piece a week that I am really proud of, I’m doing well. And the more good days I have the more like an impostor I feel.

When I write a really good article that readers love, I feel I have developed a skill set that should enable me to do the same thing any time I want. My inability to do so just proves, in my mind, that the skills aren’t real. This strange thing goes on in my head where I think that more good writing days, more days with skillfully written, insightful, interesting or humorous pieces that people want to read, means more ability. More ability means I should be able to produce these types of easily written pieces all the time.

Yet, I can’t do so, not even the majority of the time. So with what should be increasing skills and ability level, the more unable I am to write up to what I think should be my potential, the greater the indication is that I have no talent. This belief torpedoes my efforts even further by sinking my mood, making me less productive, so I actually feel as if I’m going in the other direction.

But writing isn’t just skill sets and rules to follow. It’s creativity and writing in unique ways, with a unique voice and viewpoint. It’s a whole lot of things that can’t necessarily be described and which are often more a part of the actual person doing the writing than whatever technique they’ve been taught.

It’s personality, and presenting things in ways that haven’t been done before. It’s the ability to evoke emotion in people or help them see things in new ways. These aren’t the sort of things you can necessarily always plan on being able to produce every day or whenever you choose.

So, What’s the Answer?

I think for me the first step is insight. Then understanding that writing ability is not the same as mathematical skill, for example where success is a matter of new skills building on old ones.

Then comes accepting that every story won’t be extraordinary and that the remarkable ones that just flow out of us are always going to be the exception to the rule.

After that we have to commit to writing all the other stories, the ones that aren’t earth shattering but are still interesting and provide readers with entertainment or useful information.

The Takeaway

Don’t listen to the people who say that if you aren’t passionate about your writing, it will come across to readers and you will lose followers. This is a myth.You can’t expect to feel passionate, excited, and inspired about every story you write.

We all read a lot of articles every day. Few of them are life changing, but most of what we read still has something of worth to tell us. The ones that don’t, we stop reading.

When you are reading those articles that perhaps, you’re not really very excited about, notice what small facets cause you to continue reading. Keep a list of these in your writing notebook to review on those passionless days. Not so they can inspire passion, but so you have possibilities for what you might include in an article that you aren’t particularly excited about to make still make it engaging.

Remind yourself that this, too, is a writing skill, one that says more about you as a writer than all your impassioned, inspired works. After all, anyone can write on days when they are filled with inspiration and passion. It is those who can consistently write solid pieces worth reading on all of the other days when their Muse doesn’t show up for work, who are the genuine writers.

Natalie Frank (Taye Carrol) has had work featured in Haunted Waters Press, Weirdbook Magazine, Siren’s Call Publications, Lycan Valley Press and Zero Fiction among others. Her poetry has been featured in several anthologies. She is the Managing Editor for Novellas and Serials at LVP Publications.

You can follow me and find links to all of the articles, essays, fiction and poetry I publish on Medium here. Thanks for reading and for supporting Mental Gecko!