🦶Every Writer Walks a Unique Path: Success, Envy, and Being Yourself

Most of us have a nasty habit of comparing ourselves to other writers and authors. Let’s stop. We each walk a unique path of creativity and fulfillment.

President Theodore Roosevelt said, “Comparison is the thief of joy.” That’s reason enough to curtail comparing, but another good reason is to avoid the risk of being drawn down the dark road of envy.

Envy is defined as: a feeling of discontented or resentful longing aroused by another’s possessions, qualities, or luck.

When you’ve been writing for a long time and still haven’t experienced the kind of success you’d hoped for, envy finds its way in.

Writers want to experience success in their vocations just like anyone else. In many fields, a desire for personal success is often connected to a belief that social recognition and increased status will make us more lovable and worthy of attention. But even deeper than this, perhaps unconscious, is a fundamental longing to be a part of something that matters.

For writers, this longing is usually activated by having read something that mattered to us when we were young. Something that changed us, that woke us up to the possibility that we could be creative too.

A desire to be successful at something that is personally meaningful seems reasonable enough to me. But the journey between realizing one’s desire to create and becoming a person— like a writer—who makes things to share with the world (and maybe even gets paid for it), can be a long one. On that long and winding road one feels many things, including admiration for those writers one strives to emulate. But over time admiration can twist into envy. When it does, try to learn from it.

If you envy an author’s success it usually means you also want such success, but it feels out of reach. Envy arises when what we long for feels too far away from our own reality. We tend to admire what we believe is still within reach.

The antidote to envy and comparison is to first lean into your individuality, to go back to your initial hopes and dreams and take stock.

What dreams do you have for your writer-self? What is the reality you perceive around you right now? How big is the gap between? And within that gap, how many steps would it take to get from reality to dream? How many of those are within your control?

Every single writer has their own row to hoe in the great garden of the creative writing world. No two lives are the same and no two voices are the same.

Shakespeare, Virginia Woolf, Douglas Adams, Maya Angelou, Stephen King, and James Joyce have little in common with each other—divided by time and taste and so much more—but they all share(d) a common commitment to the written word. They dreamed, drafted, revised, and submitted their work. And each possessed the kind of talent, tenacity, and luck that supported getting their work published and having it last.

Though I typed that list of writers randomly, on reflection I’ve learned something big or small from each of them at some point. I bet you have too.

We all need role models, but we cannot be them. We can only be ourselves—unabashedly, authentically, and unapologetically.

As we write, no doubt we’ll fall short of our envied and admired ideals, but we will allow something new to enter the world, something that can only come through our unique ways of seeing the world.

It makes no sense to compare ourselves to writers of the past, or even those in the present, except to acknowledge the common element that truly matters: a love for and commitment to the written word.

The writers of the past didn’t know if they would become known, successful, stand the test of time, or remain unknown forever, but they wrote anyway. Those of us writing now will be, in the future, the writers of the past. Known and unknown. That last bit is a gamble, and mostly out of our control, except for the foundational part: doing the actual writing in our inevitably unique ways.

“No one can build you the bridge on which you, and only you, must cross the river of life. There may be countless trails and bridges and demigods who would gladly carry you across; but only at the price of pawning and forgoing yourself. There is one path in the world that none can walk but you. Where does it lead? Don’t ask, walk.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche ~

“Writing is a path to meet ourselves and become intimate.”

~ Natalie Goldberg ~