In our society, which encourages innovation and motivation in pursuit of excellence, competition between people is constantly stressed as a means of success. The natural result of this competitiveness in our society is that we constantly compare ourselves to others. Writers, like all creative people, are particularly susceptible to this trap. Unsurprisingly, this leads more often than not to feelings of disillusionment and self-loathing, which can be lethal to our own success in such a solitary career. All too often, we ask, “Why is he/she getting that contract/all that work/that review?” and put ourselves down in the process. Despite the fact that this is patently counterproductive, we continue to do this on a regular basis—but this does not have to be the case.
Whom You Should Be Competing With
You shouldn’t abandon all competition, as you stand to make no improvement that way. There’s only one person, however, with whom you can truly compete, and that person is yourself. Instead of asking how or why someone else is succeeding, compare the person you are today against your past self. You aren’t in competition with anybody but yourself, and it’s your own work and capacity that you need to exceed in order to succeed. If you’re a better writer today than you were yesterday, you’ve achieved something. A popular proverb in the north of England, where many people work back-breaking, laborious industrial jobs, is “nobody ever got rich looking in someone else’s pockets.” When you compare yourself and your success to other people, you’re looking in someone else’s pocket. You don’t get better when you look at how well someone else is doing, and you certainly aren’t making any improvements coveting what they have. The secret to success in any field is to only ever compete with your past self. With writing, that means constant self-criticism and evaluation of your own skills.
The Final Solution
Be your own worst critic. According to John Emge, the famous blogger whose work has been published on blogs at Guardian, Times, Buddy Loans, etc., “Don’t just compare your work today to that of your past self, but be absolutely brutal and vitriolic in your self-criticism. You shouldn’t criticize who you are as a person, or your life choices, but your output”. Is the work you wrote today better than what you could do yesterday? If so, why? If not, why not? If you’re harder on your creative output than anybody else, you stand a greater chance of improvement and therefore a higher chance of success in the real world.
The great writers of the past century – Joyce, Faulkner, Elizabeth Bowen, and their contemporaries – were all enormously critical of their own work. The only way they rose to the peak of their writing powers, capable of delivering masterpieces like Ulysses and Light in August, was through constant, vigorous self-criticism and a pragmatic approach to their writing. William Faulkner, despite being a critically acclaimed proponent of cerebral High Modernist fiction, wrote Hollywood scripts to help pay his bills. All writing experience will improve you as a writer. When you’re evaluating your own work, keep Faulkner in mind: no matter what he wrote, he always endeavored to write it better than his last work.