The great pretender
When someone asks what you do, do you smile and say, ‘I’m a writer’? Or do you mumble something along the lines of, ‘Oh, this and that, a bit of writing and stuff’, and hope they don’t hear the word ‘writing’?
If you’re in the latter category, you – like many other writers – suffer from Imposter Syndrome.
What is Imposter Syndrome?
Imposter Syndrome is feeling your writing’s not good enough for you to call yourself a writer. It’s feeling everyone in the writing workshop is a proper writer except you. It’s feeling that, because you’re self-published, you’re not really a writer. It’s feeling it was luck, not talent and hard work, that landed you that book deal.
Who gets Imposter Syndrome?
Psychologists Pauline Rose Clance and Suzanne Imes came up with the term Imposter Syndrome (or Imposter Phenomenon) in 1978. Originally, they thought it only inflicted high-achieving women, but further studies showed it plagued men too, although to a much lesser degree.
Speaking of high-achieving women, Maya
