Outstanding (our word, not hers!) NTU third-year BA Creative Writing student Tilly Hollyhead writes candidly and beautifully about overcoming feelings of inadequacy.
After nearly three years at university, I expected I would have shifted the more damaging attitudes that I had towards writing. In particular, I thought that I would have stopped comparing myself to other writers by now. Yet here I am, writing my final blog post on the cusp of graduation, with my attitude still very much the same. And no, this isn’t a post full of doom and gloom. Not at all.
I have always been acquainted with a feeling of inadequacy, a tendency to compare myself detrimentally to others. It started in primary school, my head filled with fantasies and my social skills augmented by what I now wonder might be undiagnosed autism. I had no idea what made me ‘different’. I flip-flopped between thinking there was something wrong with my classmates, and thinking there was something wrong with me, something that stopped me from learning the invisible rules they all seemed to understand. Thankfully, they weren’t the harshest judges in the world.
Then secondary school came along, and I began comparing myself to new sets of classmates, now with hormones and newly emerging anxiety added to the mix. I tried to do what they did. It all seemed very simple: tuck your jumper in at the bottom, roll up your skirt, find a cute hairstyle, and suddenly you have friends. It will come as no shock to anyone that none of that worked out.
I know that this has little to do with writing, but it’s important that you know that, while I was very much aware of my social flaws, my worries never extended to my use of words. They were original. They were creative. They were untouched by those who seemed so much better than me at some other things, because nobody else in my immediate social circle seemed to be a writer.
The process was sacred, in a way, until I joined NTU to study Creative Writing more formally. My arrival to a new social scene, and my surprising success in garnering a dozen friends in the first week, quickly built up a sense of confidence that I wasn’t aware I could have. Armed with my words, and my maiden attempt at writing a novel, I stepped into my first workshop thinking that everything was right with the world. What I didn’t account for was the fact that there would be so much talent around me. On my left sat one of the best prose writers I have ever known (a description I’m sure she’ll deny), and on my other sat a poet who had in me in awe of what he could do in a genre that I had thought I hated. In comparison, my words were child’s play, my musings those of someone who lacked fundamentals. They were not good enough and, suddenly, the work that I had deemed so sacred was nothing more than slop in my eyes.
As I made clear at the beginning of this post, this was an attitude I have never quite put to bed, even after seeing how much I’ve improved. I now see myself as a decent writer who has done just enough. The praise I give to my work is sparing, at best.
I suppose the logical thing to do now would be to tell you about my advice about how to get over this feeling, which I know is not uncommon, and I will never shy away from sharing whatever insights I think I have. I have more experience now, and much more ahead of me. I would not be myself if I did not try to use that to help others make their journey towards writing a little bit easier. However, nothing has banished these thoughts from your brain.
There will be a few people out there ‘blessed’ with a comparative lack of self-consciousness. The majority of us are not so lucky. I can preach endlessly about how writing is not a race. There is something amazing to be found in conversations between writers. They often bring out a sense of community that restores a bit of faith. You’ll see glimpses of humanity in the feral creatures slumped behind laptop screens or slaving over sheets of paper, through their ability to help others and themselves at once – writers aware of the metaphorical miles upon miles they must travel in pursuit of improvement. In a writing community, like the one I’ve found here, the struggle is made more bearable because other people are going through the same things. A writing community is invaluable, I’ve learned.
And I have two other pieces of advice. The first is something simple: ask yourself if you are trying your best.
And when I write ‘ask yourself’, I do not mean pondering the question for a second before going about your business as if nothing has changed. I mean taking fifteen minutes at the end of the day to sit down. Make a list of your accomplishments if you need to, whatever it will take to look back on your day. Of course, it may be scary. It’s never pleasant to be faced with the possibility that you may not be spending your time in the most productive manner.
Which leads me nicely to my second piece of advice: give yourself three goals that you can work towards.
Notice how neither of these titbits involves other people? I had a revelation when writing my dissertation. I was gritting my teeth, trying to get through April while working shifts at my part-time job, and working hard to an imminent submission deadline. Every day, to avoid getting myself stuck in a spiral, I set a list of four tasks that I would have to complete. There was satisfaction in crossing each one of them off. Before I knew it, my thoughts about how well other people were doing, how some had already submitted their final copies, had escaped my mind. In its place was pride at accomplishments, and I think every writer deserves to experience that. Every day, you take one step forward, get a little closer to achieving your goal: your book or poem or screenplay.
There will be days when the list is not enough, where your goals will seem too small. That’s the beauty of it, though. You can push yourself forward, and try even harder, not because you want to keep pace with others but because you have decided it is time. You control the pace of your journey, no matter how fast the world or the people in it seem to be moving around you.
The comparison trap is easy to fall into, even easier to stay in, and hard to escape. You’ll find that writing is much more enjoyable when you’re only concerned about the words you have put on the page.
NOTTINGHAM CREATIVE WRITING HUB 