Suffering from Imposter Syndrome?

Imposter Syndrome is the blight of writers who would separate the word ‘writer’ from themselves, despite proof they have written something. It can fill a writer with feelings of inadequacy. Questions arise. Are they the next Dickens or will people think they are playing at it?

My advice is that every word written is part of a journey. Writers treat their work as an experiment until many hours of self-criticism and editing bring them something they feel others will find credible.

The way I look at it is that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Originality is born from your own view point but I think it’s fair to say most writers are tempted to throw away the best part of their idea if it sails close to something they have dug up during research into their plot or style.

I’ve lost count of the amount of Google searches which have led me to believe the idea in my head was too much like something that had already been written. In this scenario the film Throw Momma from the Train is old but gold. Its ending has always inspired me to continue what I’ve started.

At the end of the film, a serious author feels threatened by his friend having written a book about their shared experience. To his relief his friend has created an illustrated children’s book.

The bottom line is, even when telling a similar story or working within genres, two books can find an audience without being a threat to each other.

While you sweat about whether your version will be good enough, you would do well to remember what most writers know. Few people within your circle really care about your book, unless you are writing something which exposes an uncomfortable fact about them.

Joni Mitchell once wrote, love is a story told, to our friend its second hand.

Like romantic love, your work consumes you but telling its intricate workings will only make your friends glaze over.

My partner works in Construction and hasn’t read a book since leaving school. When I waved my Authors Copy of How They Shone at him, he was pleased for me and even offered to take me out for dinner, but also said,

“It looks like a book, I’ll never read it.”

You need to develop thick skin and realise you are travelling alone. Don’t expect or need your friend’s approval and don’t listen to a single word from your relatives about their idea of success.

If you have the strength to stop cringing about the fact you may never need an agent or accountant, and decide to write, you are a writer. What is important is freedom of expression.

To that end I can’t be an imposter. I know who I am. I have written things that I think are awful. I’ve written things perhaps only I thought of as brilliant, but I have written.

There would have been a time when a semi-literate chef who ended up working in College Housekeeping Departments, the lower end of the career scale in Cambridge, in order to have time to write, would have been a joke to onlookers.

If I ever thought to tell anyone I had started writing the response was always the same.

A long list of ideas to gently guide me towards something I might be more suited to. Recipe books for people who don’t know how to cook curry. No stereotyping there, my father was a very successful Indian restaurant accountant. Or, perhaps I would be better off giving advice on stain removal and hygiene.

People’s perception of me and concern for my well-being was overwhelming. They all knew me to be bad at spelling.

I doubt anyone thought me capable of writing 86,000 words about anything, yet alone the story of a boy whose life was devastated by the partition of India.

Nor would they have thought that I would know about East Pakistan, the forming of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh, and the minefield of mixed Anglo Bangladeshi marriages, but that’s what I wrote about.

Having lost my father in 2018, that’s all I wrote about for a year, while my partner slept in ignorant bliss.

My father died in Dhaka, Bangladesh. They bury within two days there. I couldn’t attend and I have no headstone to lay flowers by. How They Shone was my place to mourn.

When my mother died two years later, she asked that her ashes be disposed of at sea, so she could go travelling after Lockdown. This left me in a similar position regarding not having anywhere to place flowers.

My mother had been a prolific travel writer for a small publication, The Hardship Post, during her thirteen years in Bangladesh. When I found she had kept her writing, I made another headstone for my parents and published Jill’s Journey, The Unusual Life and Travels of Jill Rahman, South East Asia.

To keep the creative juices going, I wrote The Shard Puzzle, a small bit of creative writing about what it’s like to be stalked and not believed. You could think of it as being a head stone to the courage of people who just don’t get the help they should.

It doesn’t matter why I did it, how I did it, or whether there is going to be a film made about it. The fact is, I did it.

I self-published three books, using YouTube videos and Print on Demand services, at very little expense.

I went from being a College Housekeeper to doing the job of a hundred people in a publishing house, all experts in their particular field. I designed covers, picture edited and got published by hook or by crook, for better or worse. Having gone to all that trouble, I don’t suffer from imposter syndrome and I don’t see any good reason for anyone else to.

Ask anyone if they would be comfortable telling their fantasies or personal feelings to complete strangers. It’s a big deal to choose to share what goes on inside your head. It takes guts and, if that’s what you’ve chosen to do, you shouldn’t feel belittled by a stranger’s opinion.

If you aren’t convinced I took the right path, the only advice I can give you is this:

Don’t fry the garlic with the onions when you start a curry. It makes it dark and bitter. Crush it and add it after the liquid ingredients.

Pouring white wine on spilt red wine won’t do anything more than increase the mess. Try a Bissell Pro Heat carpet cleaner as soon as the accident happens. It’s the only way to stop your rug turning pink.

Last but not least, NEVER use an explosive mixture of Bicarbonate of soda, vinegar and hot water to unblock a sink. Chemists will tell you, this combination will produce an amazing fountain in the plughole. They will also tell you it will create a kind of white acetate, which will flow further down the drain and require the services of Dyno Rod.

If you have found the last three paragraphs more interesting than the rest of this month’s Journal, I will provide a curry recipe in the next one.

Happy writing, Rachel x