3 things writers should NEVER do to boost their self-esteem – and one thing they should
To celebrate the end of self-esteem month, we are looking at tips for improving your self-worth that serious writers seriously need to...avoid
Pictured: I’m Kind of Awesome, ‘a confidence-boosting title [which] provides the perfect place to record all the ways you're currently killin' it’. (Used copies available for 25c)
February was International Boost Your Self-Esteem Month.
I know this because a friend posted about it on Linked In. He quoted an article which suggested the following remedies for low self-esteem:
1. Avoid negative talk
2. Stop comparing yourself to others
3. Exercise
4. Celebrate your strengths
He added his own piece of advice:
Do what makes you happy.
I am going to offer up my own secret shortly. But first, let’s think about the problem of self-esteem, as it affects writers – and as a body of people, it affects us horribly.
If you’re in the service economy generally, it’s been a tough year for having your self-esteem boosted. Chefs don’t get stars and nice reviews. Hairdressers don’t get thank-you notes from customers. And writers don’t get commissions. We don’t even get to go down the pub and cry on the shoulder of a friend while they stroke our heads and say ‘there, there, everyone knows you’re brilliant’.
What’s the most practical way of boosting your self esteem? Getting paid. So how’s that going, freelance writers?
Many of you will be reaching for that favourite euphemism, challenging. So yes, our sense of self esteem is under extreme pressure.
There’s just one problem with the four recipes above for boosting it. Three out of the four don’t work. In fact, if you follow them you might be doing your writing career actual damage.
Exercise is the exception. Do that, but be choosy. The writer’s exercise of choice is walking. That means walking unplugged – no headphones – taking in what you see around you and having a good old think. Maybe bench-pressing helps some people with their syntax and story structure. I just haven’t come across any of those people yet. But I do know a lot of writers who walk a lot.
Why is the rest of the advice disastrous?
Avoid negative talk. Please don’t. Positive things will come out of COVID, I’m convinced of it: but let’s not pretend it’s not a negative experience for many, many people. If need be, rebrand that word ‘negative’. Seek the facts, positive, negative or neutral. Find some perspective: understand what’s happening to you in the wider context of humanity. After all, it’s not all about you.
Good writing is about understanding the world, the light and the shade – but it’s harder to write convincingly about the light if you avoid the shade. Take an example: travel writing. It’s never been a worse time to be a travel writer. That sounds negative, but it’s a fact. But watch what happens when we travel writers get to travel again. Boy, our copy is going to sing. The world is going to seem a magical, colourful, wonderful place after the long months facing the same four walls.
And I don’t see how you can avoid negativity or – especially – comparing yourself to others if you’re serious about a writing career.
I get that self-comparison is causing serious problems, especially for children and teens, in the social media age. And writing is an intensely personal thing. But if I read travel books by Bill Bryson, Robert Macfarlane and Tove Jansson and don’t feel a little bit cowed and envious, then I’m either super-arrogant or not a very good reader. I could avoid reading them in the first place as a way of protecting my self-esteem; but then I won’t learn anything, nor enjoy some wonderful prose, and I won’t get any better at travel writing.
In writing, your self-esteem should be inseparable from the esteem of other people – people who know their stuff, like editors. And if your writing is not esteemed as much as you’d hoped, best go away and work on things – technique, style, story selection – until it is.
So even a blog like this – fast and easy to publish as it is – will only improve if it’s ‘compared to others’ and readers point out the negatives as well as the positives.
Celebrate your strengths? Yes, do. Writers, as Hilary Mantel notes (see below), need a good helping of arrogance. But what you consider a strength may be a weakness in someone else’s eyes. They may be biased, blinkered, or just not the right editor/client/colleague for you. Or they may have a point. A writer with genuine self-esteem – not the sort that comes from lovely and supportive buddies sending you kisses on Facebook – takes that point.
Do what makes you happy? Writing does make people happy – we’ll look at that another time. Just accept it may also make you unhappy – frustrated, annoyed, blocked – before that moment comes. Light and shade. Life.
A clear path to self-esteem: my golden rule
Richards and Jagger: two very studious young men
In the early days of The Rolling Stones, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards shared a grotty flat in west London. They didn’t go out. They didn’t have girlfriends. Instead, they sat beside a record player day and night listening to the American rhythm and blues. They had an almost monastic dedication to learning how these musicians did what they did.
Later, after the band had a couple of hits with other people’s songs, their manager told them they had to write their own. So he locked them in a kitchen until they had.
Unimaginable wealth, celebrity and success flowed for Mick and Keith. But here’s the lesson. They didn’t start off thinking they were special and talented people who deserved all those things. They didn’t pose in front of the bedroom mirror. They started off as apprentices who needed to learn their craft and perfect their technique. Their sense of self-esteem – which I’m sure they had – was tempered by their sense of inferiority to the artists they admired.
Here’s my addition to that Linked In post:
You boost your self-esteem by doing what you love to do – AND by getting better at it.
If that sounds like a golden rule – it’s meant to.
So, work away patiently at your craft. If you’re a writer or want to be a writer, plug away, study other people’s work, use feedback positively – even if it’s negative – and don’t think too much about self-esteem. That can wait. That will come.
Just checking – IS there a self-esteem crisis?
In 1950, someone asked American teenagers if they thought of themselves as ‘very important’. Of that sample, 12% agreed that they did. In 2005, the figure was 80%.
And when a more recent survey of young Americans asked questions like, ‘should someone write a biography of you?’, 93% emerged as more narcissistic than 20 years before.
Those stats are from an interesting book called The Road to Character by David Brooks. Interesting, and unfashionable. If you’ve happened across this blog on Linked In, you’ll find plenty of posts telling people how awesome they are if did but know it. You may struggle to find any supporting Brooks’s idea that there is a global epidemic of self-centredness masquerading as ‘empowerment’ and ‘self-belief’.
From the Forthwrite Guide
E is for Egotiation
Sometimes the best words happen by mistake. One of our founders was trying to write ‘negotiation’ and missed off the ‘n’. Hey presto – the perfect word for those poor souls who find themselves having to mediate between egoists who are certainly not lacking in the self-esteem department.
Bonus item
E is for Affect
Oh, how the mighty stumble sometimes. This from The Washington Post:
A recent survey of experts by the journal Nature found that 90 percent of experts thought the virus was likely to become endemic, but there was no consensus on how that would effect humans.
Music for writers
Cum on Feel the Noize, by Slade
The band Slade were (or was) like a Size 10 Doc Marten boot up the backside of polite society in the 1970s. Schoolkids loved them, not least because of the two-fingered salute to their English teachers that appeared on the label of every Slade single.
Yet the boys from Bilston were also in a fine, long and honourable tradition of challenging traditional English spelling (or orthography, if you want the posh word). And, let’s face it, English orthography deserves a good kicking from time to time.
The great Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw campaigned energetically for spelling reform. He would (wud?) certainly have found common cause with Noddy Holder, Slade’s frontman and presiding genius:
An intelligent child (wrote Shaw) who is bidden to spell debt, and very properly spells it d-e-t, is caned for not spelling it with a b because Julius Caesar spelt the Latin word for it with a b.
Shaw left most his money to the cause of spelling reform. As a legacy, it achieved nothing. There were literally too many dissenting voices. The problem with the phonetic alternatives to learning standard English spelling is, whose voice is doing the speaking?
As someone born within bawling distance of Noddy, I’m fine with his Black Country phonetics (check out his other linguistic classic, I’m mee, I’m now an’ that’s ’orl). But a native London speaker might prefer ‘Cam orn, fil the noi-yse’.
Even Noah Webster and his American army of reforming lexicographers didn’t get much further than replacing ‘through’ with ‘thru’. Standard English spelling is a holy mess, but we’re stuck with it. I’m just glad I got to start on it from a young age. Pity anyone having to learn it in adulthood.
ps Holder, N, stay behind after class. You missed a comma after ‘cum on’.
Let’s end with Hilary Mantel on arrogance in writers
The most helpful quality a writer can cultivate is self-confidence – arrogance, if you can manage it. You write to impose yourself on the world, and you have to believe in your own ability when the world shows no sign of agreeing with you.
The novelist Hilary Mantel: esteemed and self-esteeming