The Hardest Part of Being a Writer

Earlier this month, we asked writers from all walks of life: “What’s the biggest thing holding you back in your writing?” One hundred forty-four answered us.

Among twenty options—everything from “I struggle to complete large projects” to “I don’t feel confident navigating publishing”—here were their top 7 answers, in order:

1. I’m worried my work isn’t good enough.
2. I don’t know how to market myself and my writing.
3. I don’t have good access to constructive feedback on my writing.
4. I struggle to stay motivated.
5. I don’t feel confident in my writing skills.
6. I don’t know which skill(s) I’m missing.
7. I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there.

What jumped out at me as I read these is how intimately our writing intersects with the painful topic of self-worth.

I’ve always felt this way personally, and now I have cold, hard data to back it up: The hardest part about writing is how it can activate our struggles with self-worth.

The hardest part about writing is how it can activate our struggles with self-worth.

How Writing Engages Self-Worth

We almost take for granted that writing tugs at our self-worth, so it can be helpful to remember where and how this happens. A good jumping-off point is the topic of rejection.

Writing is full of rejection throughout, not just at the obvious nadir of being refused by a publisher. Struggling to build a readership means facing lots of rejection: no matter how strongly we feel about our words, most others can’t be induced to care about them. Editing and critique, no matter how carefully structured, includes rejection: we must hear where, in others’ eyes, our words fall short.

Most important, and most painful, is self-rejection: I’m worried my work isn’t good enough. I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there. As our survey showed, this hurts writers more than literally anything else.

We might reject our own writing to shield from others’ criticism: “Before you say anything, I don’t like it either.” This numbs external rejection, at the cost of internalizing it. This is how we learn self-rejection: from the outside in.

We learn self-rejection from the outside in.

Then, at some point, there’s the experience of reading our own writing—writing we were excited about at the time—and finding, as if by some negative magic, that we don’t like it. This isn’t directly about others’ opinions, but is a personal noticing: This is just not good.

In other words, we feel that the goodness we intended, and which we felt as we were writing, is now not present in the words staring back up at us. We lost the goodness, somehow, exactly as some other writers don’t—the ones you’ve heard of; the good ones.

Why Is It Like This?

The pain of all this is so familiar that mentioning it almost feels like belaboring the point. But the question is: Why is it like this, and why is it so painful?

This same question holds not only for rejection, but for the closely related topics of envy, inferiority, desperation, competitiveness, arrogance, gatekeeping, snobbishness, dread, wavering motivation, writer’s block: really, every painful emotional state for which writers are known.

It’s Learned

My four-year-old daughter is a frequent and totally uninhibited storyteller. She never waits at the end for me to say, “…Oh! Yes, I liked it. I liked the part with—” She has never wondered whether she’s talented, let alone how talented. She doesn’t ask for feedback; in fact, she doesn’t care what I think. She enjoys the story as it dances in her mind, and she shares from that enjoyment.

Of course, my daughter will someday develop every adult problem we suffer from. The point, though, is that they’re learned. We develop them, like bruises, as the world starts to impact us roughly.

How does this happen? I can describe what I know of my own case.

Writing and Self-Worth: My Personal Experience

In my case, I’m worried my work isn’t good enough, and I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there. These aren’t worries about my writing ability itself, but with what feels like the incompleteness or trivialness of what I might have to say to other humans.

Beneath all this are issues with self-worth. This is why encouragement targeting what seem to be my challenges—“your writing is great!” and “you have lots to say!”—never helps, the way itch cream doesn’t douse a fire.

Beneath my issues with writing are issues with self-worth.

I’ve begun to explore the issues with self-worth through a personal journaling practice. I’ve found many straightforward sources: being bullied in adolescence; erratic experiences in my family life; social, romantic, and academic rejections. Some are more unexpected: for example, I’ve come to associate a fear-based “travel light” mentality with my mother’s parents’ families having lost everything in the Dust Bowl.

These root issues have little to do with writing, but writing activates them.

So, these root issues have rather little to do with writing, but writing activates them. To write for others—to share my inner life in language—draws on a kind of confidence that, in me, is damaged. Until I started to untangle this recently, I found it simply puzzling why I can’t do things like “set a timer and write each morning” or “write the journey, not just the destination” or “embrace rejection” or whatever, all the good advice out there.

It’s Not Just Me

I expect that this kind of thing is what most writers are suffering when they say: I’m worried my work isn’t good enough. I struggle to stay motivated. I don’t feel I’m as good as the other writers out there. We should always be growing and improving as writers, but our underlying insecurities aren’t the kind of thing that learning or accolades alone can address.

Because writing is extremely intimate, it summons, activates, what we deal with as people.

Because writing is an extremely intimate act, it summons, activates, what we deal with as people. If this is true, we need to ground how we support writers at this level, or the help we offer will tend to be of the quick-fix variety.

Where We Can Go From Here

The understanding above makes me excited to offer the following three kinds of supports on Writers.com.

1. Writing to Heal

I’ve been surprised how powerful writing can be within a broader healing process.

I have been stunned by how powerful writing can be as tool within a broader healing process. For me specifically, this takes the shape of a journaling practice, and I’ve also seen it combined with body-awareness practices. I’m very excited to explore more, and see what we can offer in this vein to Writers.com community.

The most obvious benefits of writing within healing, as I’ve experienced them, are that writing our thoughts and feelings clarifies them. It also records them, removing the pressure of either remembering them or losing them. These are more or less the base advantages of writing anything, and I’ve found them extremely helpful in personal healing.

Obviously, we can’t heal our minds fully before we start writing. (It’s taking forever in my case.) But for people who suffer in their writing, as I have, some help seems possible.

If you want to get started on this, check out our article on mixing yoga and writing, or on writing as a wellness practice.

2. Craft Foundations

What makes writing emotionally challenging becomes even harder if you feel you’re missing concrete skills that make your writing less engaging for others.

As a personal analogy: I could try to dive right into a local bar’s flamenco dancing night. However, I am an untrained and also a terrified dancer in general, and it would take a cosmically more healed person than I am to suffer the embarrassment of dancing flamenco publicly, rather than just an astronomically more healed person to learn basic principles of dance like what “footwork” means and why it matters.

Many basic writing craft elements are straightforward.

Many of these basic craft elements are straightforward. In prose, for example, learning to reword into the active voice and to reduce adverb use can do much to improve our writing. I’m excited to support exploring these foundations in community.

If you want to get started on building craft foundations, you can start with our overview of prose writing style. 

3. Mindset Support

Understanding that writing engages the deepest—including the most painful—parts of ourselves, we can approach our writing with full respect for what we’re activating.

If we understand that writing engages the deepest parts—including the most painful parts—of ourselves, then we can work with ourselves and one another on that basis. This would mean compassionate, non-bypassing support for one another, as we approach our writing with full respect for the parts of ourselves we’re activating.

I’m not aware of a single resource that’s doing exactly this (if there is one, please tell me), so this would be something I’d want to explore in community, to see what works.

To explore mindset a little more, here’s an article I wrote on the topic of working with writer’s block.

Summing Up

If you were just curious what’s the hardest part of being a writer, I hope the answer you’ve found here—that writing activates our struggles with self-worth—feels intuitively right.

Beyond that, I’d love to hear your thoughts and suggestions on the ideas above, and more broadly on how to support the whole human being that each writer is. This is where I want Writers.com to go in the future, and I want very much to hear what you feel would help.