When You Fear That Your Writing Doesn’t Measure Up to Your Ambitions

It’s worth being curious about our ambitions, and open to reframing or adjusting them as we go.

stack of multicolored notebooks with a small wooden ladder leaning propped up against the stack
(CatLane / Getty)

Dear I Have Notes,

I look forward to getting your newsletter in my inbox—it’s been a boon to my writing life. I have a question I’d like to ask you: How do you cope when your writing doesn’t match your ambitions? I often feel like my skill isn’t up to the task of telling the stories I have inside me. This actually keeps me from writing sometimes. Maybe it’s impostor syndrome, because I will read writers I admire and compare myself unfavorably to them. Intellectually, I know that the only way to improve is to keep writing and working on my craft, but it can be difficult to push through that feeling.

— Trying to Write Fiction

Dear Trying,

If you can, I think it’s worth being more specific about your creative ambitions. Considering the outcomes you crave and why they are important to you in greater detail might help you better assess whether they are truly outpacing your skills, or more closely aligned with them than you thought.

There are times when it might be necessary to wall off those negative feelings and doubts you mention above, and just write. But sometimes I find that the quickest way out is through. If I can’t shake my dread, I might set a timer for five minutes and face it head-on, letting myself catastrophize freely: I cannot possibly work on this book for one more day; everyone in the world is better at writing than I am; this will ruin my career … (you get the gist—things can get very grim). Of course, I’ll never fully excise these feelings and fears; they will return, and return, for as long as I write. But my rule is that I can only give them my attention for a little while, and then I have to get back to work.

It’s good and admirable to aim high, to be willing to try something knowing that you might not succeed. But it isn’t always possible to determine the strength or value of a story, or decide how “successful” it is, as you’re working on it. These things are highly subjective—we never know how others will read or receive something we have written. The way we feel about our own work can shift so much over time. And sometimes we have no idea what we are capable of writing until we manage to do it.

A friend who’s read both my first book and my second recently gave me some of the best feedback a writer can get: “You’ve improved.” They said many other kind things, but You’ve improved” is the part that made me glow. It also made me think about the ambition I had for this latest story. When I began working on it, I wanted it to be the best thing I had written or would ever write—it had to be, I thought, in order to be worthy of people I love and have now lost. Like you, I worried that my writing wouldn’t be equal to the task. Though it’s a story I have learned to love and feel proud of, I know I made the job of drafting it harder, at least initially, by telling myself that I had to reach some imaginary pinnacle of my career and anything less meant failure. What if my ambition, all along, had been to improve? To see if I could write a stronger book than my last?

What I’m trying to say is that sometimes I think it’s worth being curious about our ambitions, and open to reframing or adjusting them as we go. Not for the sake of going easy on ourselves—I don’t feel less driven than I used to be; if anything, I expect more of myself and my writing than I ever have before. But I’ve also found that the work comes more easily when I channel that ambition toward feeding my practice, focusing on a specific kind of progress I can actually feel and assess: Am I taking risks, learning new things, approaching my writing without fear? Am I working with as much care and precision and generosity as possible? Am I being patient with the story, and with myself? These things, too, are worthy aims, and may be indicators of my growth as a writer.

To close, a note about comparing yourself to others: I think it’s important to try to identify what it is you admire about the work of other writers. That is how every writer I know reads. But I personally find that comparison is an impossible and therefore unwinnable game to play. Remember, no one in the world wants to tell the stories you do. You’re trying to do something only you can—which means that nobody else can beat you to it, or do it “better.”

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Do you have a question about writing or creative work that you’d like me to answer in a future newsletter? Send it to ihavenotes@theatlantic.com.

Nicole Chung is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of its newsletter I Have Notes. She is the author of A Living Remedy.