How Not to Compare Yourself to Other Writers

How Not to Compare Yourself to Other Writers

We all know it’s a bad idea, but we still do it: we see another writer’s post about some success and along with being happy for them, we feel jealous and insecure. No matter how successful we are, we’ve still got unfulfilled dreams, and when we see others selling to a market we’ve been rejected from (or were too scared to even try), or being nominated, celebrated, published—we wish it was also us. We start to think it will never be us.

It’s hard to turn those thoughts off, but we can counter them with facts. So next time your anxiety is fussing, throw these truths at it:

It’s not a competition

Okay, yes, on a small scale, it literally is. Contests have three winners, and magazines have only so many slots for stories every month. But in the big picture, your writing career is not competing with anybody else’s writing career.

So-and-so sold a story to an anthology? Somebody else found a book publisher? Someone won an award? Cool. That doesn’t mean you can’t. It’s a very large publishing world, and there is room for so many of us to walk the path together.

My parent always says the back of a 5k race is one of the friendliest places in the world. That’s because back there, nobody is racing against anyone but themselves. They’re just chatting with the kids in the strollers and petting the dogs and hoping to beat their own best race time. It doesn’t matter what the person next to them is doing. Which is exactly my next point:

Their journey is not your journey

Just like nobody trains for a 5k in the same way, nobody’s path to a successful writing career is the same. Even the definition of “success” varies from writer to writer. It’s so important to set your own goals based on what you personally want, and not rate yourself on somebody else’s metric.

Say you see a writer has gotten an agent, but honestly, you’ve always thought the traditional publishing path is more trouble than it’s worth. You’ve got your sights on a self-published novel. If that’s the case, then when your brain says things like You’re not good enough to get an agent, you can tell it to shut up, because getting an agent doesn’t matter for you. And anyway, it’s likely not true, as we shall see:

The reason you got rejected is not what you think

Let’s say you’ve got a goal of selling to a print magazine. You want to hold something in your hand with your name on it, and autograph it for your mom. So you look up a bunch of print magazines and start submitting. And get rejected. And rejected. Meanwhile, a bunch of other writers are selling stories to these markets.

Before deciding you’re the worst writer ever, let’s look at what’s going on behind the curtain. Say the editors get 100 submissions for that month. And then let’s say, as actually, really, truly happens, half didn’t follow the guidelines in a really egregious manner (we’re not talking little stuff presses often overlook like Arial vs Times New Roman—more like sending erotic poetry to a horror story call), so they get tossed. The press now has 50 stories—what are the odds that only five of them are actually well-written? Pretty low. But the press can only take five, so they have to pick what’s right for them at the time.

Which means, when you get your rejection letter, it’s not because your story was bad. It’s because the editors were served a feast and couldn’t clear the table before they got full. You will get published when you get the right story before the right editor at the right time. When and where is that? Nobody knows! But it does mean your time is coming. So send that story back out. Write another piece that’s right for the magazine. It’s going to be your turn eventually.

Also, don’t be scared to try those super-exclusive markets. What are they going to do, say no? Welcome to being a writer, right? We hear “no” all the time. We can take it. And we never give up.

Want some advice on submitting stories? How to Publish a Short Story

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