This morning the littlest and I jumped back into our regular day care routine. Up at 6:30 — I’ve been up since 5am working on my novel — bottle, fresh diaper, dressed and in the car for day care by 7:30. As usual, I switched on a podcast for the drive.
Lately I’ve been bingeing the How Writers Write podcast. If you have not heard of it, give it a listen. The host, Brian, recently left his job in business to be a full time writer and writing coach. As an emerging author, Brian approaches his interviews with a freshness that only comes from someone who is truly hungry to learn from his interviewees.
In his latest podcast, Brian interviews Amy Harmon. The self-published, New York Times Best Selling, mother of four has written an unbelievable fourteen books including What the Wind Knows, Slow Dance in Purgatory, and A Different Blue. Harmon’s latest book, The First Girl Child, released on Amazon in August, 2019.
I’m not halfway through this podcast and already I’m on fire with inspiration. There is something really special about hearing success stories from authors who chose a non-traditional publishing route.
Harmon talks about learning a sense of confidence in what she does through her experiences with her siblings. She says that she and all five of her siblings grew up knowing that they could figure out how to get things done and not to wait for someone to do it for them. She gave the example of her younger sister who needed a new roof put on her house, so after some research she put the new roof on her house. “And now she tiles her floors,” Harmon says.
“Maybe it’s because we had nothing growing up and it was either you figured it out or you didn’t get it,” she says.
This GO GET IT attitude is really inspiring to me. I’m often overcome with a feeling that I don’t deserve or I don’t belong to this writing community. The critic in my head asks, “Exactly who do you think you are, Little Miss Big Britches?”
Imposter syndrome is a real problem, and especially for writers. It can be difficult to explain what you do, especially if you have not yet been published.
“Oh you’re a writer,” people say with a smile. “Have you published anything I may have heard of?” The smile usually dims when you explain you haven’t quite gotten anything out there. It might turn to confusion if you try spinning it into a phrase like “break out novelist,” or “emerging author.”
To make matters worse, writing can be a long slow process. Having spent much of your time thinking, you may only have a couple hundred words down after a day of writing. It can take years to produce even a first draft of a novel.
For me, this slow production process only fuels the critic in my head. She starts to recruit other critics. They form committees. By the end of it imposter syndrome has set in completely and I’m ready to burn the whole manuscript up and I’ve somehow become convinced that my family will be living on the streets in a week’s time and it’s most definitely all my fault.
My husband and I are in the process of opening a brewery in Austin. Starting a business is scary, but after a day of brewing you’ve produced a batch of something that you can, and will (because…beer) sell.
The isolated life of a writer, as well as that of a mom, can be maddening if I allow it to be. Which is why part of my writing life absolutely must involve community, be it through Twitter, Facebook, my online writing group who I meet with every other week via Hangouts, or my local writers’ league. We are very fortunate in Texas to have a robust and well supported writer’s league.
I believe you get back what you put into something, so I also try to support those who’ve supported me. I explained to my hubby last night that it’s just as important for me to show up for other writers — read and review their books, follow them, recommend them to friends, listen to their podcasts, and the like — as it is for us to attend brewery openings and support other brewers around town.
After all, we’re all in this together, but nobody’s going to just hand it to us. So don’t let the critic form committees and just keep writing!
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