Imposter Syndrome and the Value of the Day Job

READER QUESTION: Did you ever feel like an imposter when you first started writing? If so, how did you get past that? Thanks for any advice you're willing to give!

I started writing in third grade and published my first novel at 56. So, from a commercial standpoint, I’ve had plenty of time to feel imposter-ish. Perhaps I’m not the example most writers want to follow.

One way to avoid feeling like a poser is to stop asking the world for validation. Therein lies the value of the day job. A day job is not a surrender or a waste of time. A day job may be the thing that allows you to keep writing. It may be something closely tied to your heart’s work—teaching, librarianship, technical writing; or it can be something totally unrelated that doesn’t use up your “juice” for writing. High paying and flexible would be great, but I didn’t find those kinds of jobs.

I still did work that fueled me. I worked my way through college as an advertising sales person and copy editor. I’ve been a dietitian, researcher, health care administrator, college professor, wife and parent of two sons.

To me, a day job is more than a means of keeping food on the table and a roof over your head. It is not a way to “kill time” while you wait for success. That’s not fair to those around you who deserve your full attention and effort.

One great advantage of a day job is that it gives you a place to be successful when everyone is saying no to you as a writer. While publishers were turning down my short stories and agents were saying no to me as a client, I published research that helped others in my field, I established a diabetes education program, I took first-generation college students like me from self-doubt to success and graduation.  

 A day job is also a place to gather material for story. All writers mine their own experiences for scene, for character, for drama and plot. It is experience that gives a writer something unique to say, and experience that gives us commonality with our readers and credibility as a fellow human.

One benefit of having a day job is that you don’t fall into the trap of judging your writing by its ability to support you financially. A writing teacher once told me that when your work is rejected, that rejection doesn’t turn it into garbage. It has no impact on the quality of the work at all. It reflects a mismatch between writer and reader. Hold onto that, while using any feedback provided to make your work better.

Be grateful to loved ones who value what you do, but beware of the pressure of their expectations. Living with someone who is waiting for you to become a spectacular success as a writer would be, to my mind, a special kind of hell. At a writing workshop once, I spoke to a parent who had attended on behalf of her child, who had somewhere else to be (!). When Mom quizzed me for career advice for her daughter, I shared my recommendation that young writers consider how they will make a living until they can make a living as a writer. She said, “Oh, her father and I would be happy to support her until she achieves success.” That gave me the shudders.

When I was a child, my mother was a great supporter of my reading and writing. The work, not its potential for fame and fortune. She passed away before my first work was published, but that didn’t make her support any less valuable. When I began earning real money as a writer, my husband was thrilled but also somewhat ambushed.

The downside of all of this “experience” is exhaustion, of course. Before I became a full time writer, I was getting up at 4 a.m. in order to fit writing into my other commitments to family and work. I often fell asleep on the keyboard. But I never stopped writing—poetry, personal essays, scientific papers, newspaper and magazine articles and novels. I published more and more.

I found an agent who would have me, and my first novel went to auction. My third book hit the New York Times list and I was offered a three-book contract. That’s when I quit my day job.

I was fortunate to be married to someone with insurance, and to have enough paid work behind me to qualify for a pension one day. This fall I will publish my fifteenth novel. Many have had a smoother path to publication than I, but I still count myself lucky to be able to do this for a living.

I’ve been blessed to find an audience, but I would still be a writer even if I had not. Writing serves the writer as well as the reader. If helps us remember who we were in a different season, before today crowds out yesterday.

If there’s an imposter in this business, it’s the person who is not writing, but tells you about the great books that they’ll write some day, books and stories that are much better than anything else in the market now. Stories that are possibly much better than yours.

A writer is someone who writes, and by that measure I was never an imposter. If you are writing, neither are you.