I struggle with comparisonitis A LOT. It’s a dreadful mindset where I compare myself unfavourably with other writers, how much they’re doing, how many projects they’re working on, and just how well they’re doing. Unfortunately, I never come off best in these comparisons. One of the things that I struggle the most with is wondering whether I’m actually achieving enough to be a ‘real writer’. How much should I be writing in a day? What sort of workflow do you have to have to be constantly creating such amazing things? If I want to be a prolific writer, how much should I be writing? What on earth am I actually supposed to be doing?
Today, I was listening to an episode of The Creative Penn Podcast, a podcast I highly recommend if you want to learn about the craft of writing, and the business of being a writer. It was a really interesting interview with author Toby Neal. She’s an extremely prolific writer of crime thrillers, action adventures, and romance novels. Toby Neal is the sort of writer where a bad publishing year is one where she only releases four books. You’d think that a person who publishes that many books must write an insane amount every day. But do you know how many words she averages in a day?
2,500
Not 10K, or even 5k, like I expected, but a mere 2,500 words. Now, to some of us, that might still seem like a huge amount of words. But when you think about it, that’s a surprisingly small number for someone who can release a new book every three months or so. It’s not some pie in the sky, ‘real writer’ number that we mere mortals can only dream of achieving some day. It’s doable. A real writer, who publishes quality books, really quickly, writes the same amount that most of us could manage in a day.
So maybe being a ‘real writer’ has less to do with how much you can achieve in a day than we think. Perhaps, instead of trying to judge ourselves off whether we’re doing enough to count ourselves as ‘real writers’, to the detriment of enjoyment and quality, it would be more beneficial to judge ourselves based on how consistently we write, how hard we work to make sure that our words are the best they can be, how invested we are in learning and improving our craft, and how dedicated we are to finishing the things we begin.
In the end, there is no set definition for what makes a ‘real writer’. There are as many different ways to be a writer as there are people writing. Avoiding the comparison trap.is one of the hardest things to do, but in the end, the truth is, it doesn’t matter what other people do, or how much or little they’re writing. It just matters what you do. If you write as often as possible, if you put in consistent effort to write and improve, and if you love what you do, then you are a ‘real writer’. There’s no yardstick. here. There’s no magical amount you have to achieve in a day. There’s just your writing process. Every writer is different. Even the most prolific writers don’t achieve huge things every day. And that’s pretty encouraging, I think.
These are just a few of my thoughts. I would love to hear from you. Do you find it encouraging to hear about the day to day working lives of professional writers? Do you suffer from comparisonitis? Let’s chat in the comments down below!
