We're all impostors

Recently I read a LitHub questionnaire with novelist Ruth Ozeki.

(Ozeki, as you may recall from previous newsletters, is the author of the magical novel A Tale for the Time Being. That's a novel that required me to be a certain reader before it worked; I tried reading it a few times, and abandoned it each time, realizing there was something wonderful there, but which I wasn't quite ready for. When a couple of years ago I finally gave it another try, the novel met me right where I was, and it completely swept me away. It ought to have a place on your reading list, if you haven't already experienced it.)

In the LitHub piece, Ozeki touches on a number of interesting topics. (The whole piece is really worth a read.) She talks about the single reader she most wishes would read her books. She talks about her personal writing process—which involves starting while "still half asleep"—and writer's block.

But what hit me most was her answer to this question:

What's the best writing advice you've ever received?

If you've read many interviews with authors—or hell, any creator, regardless of medium—this is a question that comes up time after time. What's the best advice for being creative? Everyone struggles with making things. We make things that don't live up to our goals for them; we find it hard to start the process of making; we don't know what to do with things once we've made them. This question is a big, vague one; it's often a useless interview question, frankly.

But Ozeki's answer was pretty great.

Karen Joy Fowler told me, “You can only be the writer you are.” I found this very helpful because it took away some of my anxiety at not being a better writer, or a different writer, or any writer other than me. It reassured me that the writer I am is enough, at least for now, because this is what’s possible for me now.

I've heard a lot of variations on this lately, it seems, each of them zeroing in on the artistic person's built-in sense of impostor syndrome. You've probably experienced it before. Most of us, I think, have. Many of us never stop experiencing it.

From a New York Times piece on the syndrome, I learned that Maya Angelou once said:

I have written 11 books but each time I think, ‘Uh-oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’

Shonda Rhimes, who created the television shows Scandal, Grey's Anatomy, etc., wrote a book called Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person, in which she said this:

We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us. We all spend our lives trying to follow the same path, live by the same rules. I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be.

In an interview with Terry Gross, Tom Hanks—known the world round for his Academy Award-winning performances and his many classic movies—said:

No matter what we've done, there comes a point where you think, 'How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud, and take everything away from me?' ... It's a high-wire act that we all walk. ... There are days when I know that 3:00 tomorrow afternoon, I am going to have to deliver some degree of emotional goods, and if I can't do it, that means I'm going to have to fake it. If I fake it, that means they might catch me at faking it, and if they catch me at faking it, well, then, it's just doomsday.

Tina Fey has her own take on impostor syndrome:

Ah, the impostor syndrome! The beauty of the impostor syndrome is you vacillate between extreme egomania, and a complete feeling of: 'I'm a fraud! Oh, god, they're on to me! I'm a fraud!' So you just try to ride the egomania when it comes and enjoy it, and then slide through the idea of fraud. Seriously, I've just realised that almost everyone is a fraud, so I try not to feel too bad about it.

Fey's last comment there reminds me of something Oliver Burkeman wrote. Discussing the prevalence of blunders we see in the news—blunders performed by famous, powerful people, or by presumably competent corporations—Burkeman said:

We need them to appear ultra-competent, too, because we derive much psychological security from the belief that somewhere, in the highest echelons of society, there are some near-infallible adults in charge.

In fact, though, everyone is totally just winging it.

Burkeman goes on to describe how, while growing up, he assumed that newspapers were put together by people who really had their shit together. "Then," he writes, "I got a job at a newspaper." He chalks most of this up to his British homeland—"a certain bumbling Britishness," he calls it—then relocates to America, where, he discovers, "everyone is totally just winging it."

Burkeman's big takeaway:

This realisation is alarming at first, but it's ultimately deeply reassuring. As the UK organisation Action for Happiness likes to point out, one of the biggest causes of misery is the way we chronically "compare our insides with other people's outsides". We're all mini-New York Timeses or White Houses, energetically projecting an image of calm proficiency, while inside we're improvising in a mad panic. Yet we forget (especially in an era of carefully curated Facebook profiles and suchlike) that everyone else is doing the same thing. The only difference is that they think it's you who's truly competent.

Burkeman's right: Discovering that clearly successful people suffer from self-doubt and impostor syndrome is, at least for me, quite reassuring. Because if they experience it after decades of proven success in their field, it's perfectly natural for me to experience it at this time in my own.

My favorite movie is Contact. Jodie Foster, who stars in that movie, was interviewed on 60 Minutes several years ago. About winning the Academy Award for an earlier film, The Accused, she said:

I thought it was a big fluke. The same way when I walked on the campus at Yale, I thought everybody would find out, and then they’d take the Oscar back.

Jodie Foster grew up in the film business. By the time she won the Oscar for The Accused, she'd been acting for twenty years (since her first TV role, in 1968, on Mayberry R.F.D.). And a couple of years after that first Oscar...she won again, this time for The Silence of the Lambs.

And Kazuo Ishiguro, who is not only one of my favorite authors, but who in 2017 won the Nobel Prize for Literature—joining Mario Vargas Llosa, Mo Yan, Bob Dylan, Seamus Heaney, John Steinbeck, V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, T.S. Eliot, William Faulkner, George Bernard Shaw...you get the idea—is also no stranger to questioning the value of his work.

In an episode of the podcast How to Fail, Ishiguro is asked the following question:

Elizabeth Day: Do you feel like an impostor now, or do you think that the Nobel Prize has maybe helped you get over that?

Ishiguro: I don't think the Nobel Prize has done anything one way or the other about that. ... At some deeper level I worry about the whole impostor thing, yes. But not at the level of 'Do I deserve to be published? Do I deserve to be called a writer?' I don't think I ever had much doubt about that, once I got going.

I like Ishiguro's self-assurance here. I think that's what we all aspire to, a sense that the things we create are valuable, and we deserve the ability to make them, to have a seat at the cultural table, so to speak.

But Ishiguro isn't finished. His impostor syndrome, it seems, has funneled itself into a more serious question about the act of writing novels itself:

Ishiguro: But at a more profound level, I do ask: 'Is what I do really that worthwhile?' Does it merit something like a Nobel Prize, alongside scientists, you know, people who have made huge breakthroughs in medicine. Do I merit a Nobel Prize alongside such people for what I do? And I guess some of the things that have been happening in the world in recent years do lead me to actually wonder: What is the purpose of writing novels and putting them out there? Is it that important? In fact, have we been contributing to something that's a bit dodgy, given the way we seem to have shifted over onto emotions rather than truth and fact? This idea that, oh, what you feel is what matters. If you can feel it, then it's true. I'm kind of wondering if the huge emphasis I've always put, in my work, on being able to communicate through emotions and to relate to readers emotionally— Is that a sound way to be going about things, at that kind of larger level? I've often thought, you know, is this thing, what I do, is it just some sort of cultural accident, that it's been given a certain place in the hierarchy of things? And I get given prizes and knighthoods and things. But, actually, that's just some sort of historical and cultural accident, and is it actually so valuable? Is it actually contributing to something adrift away from truth, and a kind of dispassionate way of looking at things?

Let's go back to Ruth Ozeki, who wasn't finished answering the question:

The problem with being a fiction writer is that it’s always easy to imagine being someone other than who you are. Maybe that’s why I write fiction, because I want to be someone else. It’s hard to feel like I’m enough. I want to be more. I want to be better.

To some extent, the tension between the writer I am, and the writer I aspire to be, is useful. Tension can be motivating. Tension can be generative, and in fact, maybe creative acts require it.

Let's put Ishiguro's question about whether novels should be a thing aside; I can't answer that question, and probably future anthropologists will have an interesting time trying to do so. For now, let's say that writing novels is a valuable act of expression, and that it has a place in the culture.

Ozeki's hit on something here that matters: That impostor syndrome is not just about "Do I deserve to be here?" or "Will I be found out?" but about "Am I as good as the writer I want myself to be?" Ira Glass, the host of This American Life, has talked about this before, this idea that, when you start creating things, your ambitions will always be greater than your abilities. Eventually, your skill will catch up, and you'll be capable of being the artist you imagined you could be.

The thing is, I think, that for many of us "the writer we want to be" is a moving target, one that always outpaces the writer we actually are. No matter how long we've been working, bettering our skills, we can always see a better version of ourselves on the horizon. That's what Ozeki is getting at: To keep creating, we need that better version to strive for.

Still:

But too much of this aspirational tension can be distracting. You have to find a way of relaxing in that tension, and that’s what Karen’s advice reminds me to do.

You have to also be comfortable being who you are, right now, and writing the thing, right now, that you can write. You don't have to be anyone else, even your future self. You'll get there. Focusing too hard on that horizon cheapens the place you are, the person you are, right this second.

Remember that where you are now was once the horizon you battled toward. Now and then, look back and remind yourself just how far you've traveled to get here.