Welcome back to the Writer’s Secret Weapon. I’m John, I’m here to help you write better, and this is the Writer’s Secret Weapon, the deep dive into my writing toolbox to give you all the things I think you’ll need to write better.
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This is Volume 11, and today I’m going to give you all the thoughts I have about comparison and why it’s going to sink every single one of us creatively if we let it.
There’s unfortunately something all too familiar and all too universal when it comes to comparing yourself to other people. It stretches across all boundaries, all fields, all cultures, all races, all efforts. I like to tell myself there’s some anthropological history to it: that one day when as a species we came out of the trees we noticed that somebody popped out of their tree and had one more really cool stick than we did and we’ve been feeling inadequate ever since.
I don’t know if that makes it more palatable. I think I’m doing that to distance myself from the uncomfortable emotions that I feel angry and inadequate all the time.
We’ve got a lot of cute sayings about comparison: “it’s the thief of joy” “it’s as productive as a bicycle to a fish” “it’s how you never accomplish anything while feeling like you’re accomplishing everything” but I think every aphorism falls short at addressing the scope of comparison: how often and how easily we do it everyday until it’s as ingrained a habit as checking our email or making sure we have the keys before we close the front door.
I’ve got 5 things for you to think about when you catch yourself (intentionally or otherwise) comparing what you do and who you are to other people. One of the worst parts about writing any kind of advice is that you’re both guilty of the problem you’re writing about while also making it sound like the solution is as easy as flipping the lights on. No part of getting better at comparing yourself to others is easy, it challenges us to have confidence in ourselves and contentment with what we do, and both those things can feel so fleeting, even on our best days.
It might be the “natural human behavior” textbooks suggest that it is, but it’s far from our healthiest behavior. So let’s talk about it. Let’s see if we can learn to write better by treating ourselves better.
Are we truly inadequate? Really?
When a lot of us are little, our parents marked our heights in marker somewhere, tracking how we grew. I remember how proud of I was of those marks, they felt like silent accomplishments - things I was doing even when I wasn’t doing anything. Those measurements were of ourselves, and there wasn’t any reason to compare anything, it was just a measure of progress.
But at some point, we got conditioned to stop looking at progress existing independent of everybody else’s measurements and started looking at where my line is versus your line. When my parents started measuring my brother on the same column in our house, I immediately felt less special, like I was losing my accomplishment because when he was eight he was much taller than I was an eight. Sure, I was 15 when he was 8, but the feeling hurt all the same, if not moreso because everything is pain to a teenager.
Inadequacy partners up and rides shotgun with comparison because so often we’re looking at comparison in terms of disparity instead of advantage or independence. When we’re looking at what we’ve accomplished just on the basis of having accomplished something today that wasn’t there yesterday, we so often fail to sit with that feeling and really let it persist. “So what?” we say, because we’ve been conditioned to minimize things like progress in favor of grading or ranking our efforts (hint: the reason rhymes with bapitalism).
What exactly is wrong though with the last thing you wrote? With the last decision you made? With the last chapter or the last post? I’m not talking about the grammar or you did that thing again with the commas, I mean in the greater sense that you did a thing, how has your last effort somehow proven to all in existence that you’re not good enough?
Does it matter that while you did X someone did Y? Right now, as you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that someone somewhere on the planet is having the best sex of their lives while someone else somewhere else is having the worst Thursday they’ve ever had. While you were writing last week, someone else was getting married and someone somewhere was getting a puppy or giving birth or finding $5 in a pants pocket. All those things happened concurrently, and while you were writing you didn’t know about any of them, so compared to those things, how is your writing universally bad and how are you demonstrably a bad-wrong person for having written?
Okay, maybe you’re saying “John, that’s not fair, you need to compare writers to writers.” Sure, random person talking to the screen reading a Substack, let’s do that.
This whole post is about 2300 words long. I wrote it on Saturday morning before running my usual weekend errands. It’s about 3 hours of work, since I frequently stopped to change the music I was listening to or to move a cat off my lap. 3 hours, 2300 words. It’s a major item crossed off my weekly to-do list. What’s a major item off your list? That chapter where your two characters find each other after the storm hits the small town? The scene where the heroine drag races down Demon’s Spine Road? Does it matter if it’s longer or shorter than this post? Does it really make a difference to either of us if it took you more or less time than my 3 hours to write it? Does it matter that you were able to write without moving a cat every half-paragraph or so and I wasn’t?
Is what you’re doing and what you did really making you inadequate? How is accomplishing something somehow not good enough?
Gratitude down the drain
Somewhere around day 6 in rehab you start hearing about how you should be grateful. Grateful you’re not dead. Grateful you have a whole day ahead of you that you can fill with choices you make. Grateful for the sun on your face. Grateful you’re not in jail. Grateful for the air in your lungs. Grateful you’re done detoxing and the physical pain and nausea are way less today than yesterday. Grateful grateful grateful.
This at first seems like a novelty, something you’d tell children to calm them so they wait an extra ten minutes before dessert. Then it begins to feel impossible. Rehab surrounds you and marinates you in the past so it can give you the tools to forge a new present, but your time in your past, that time spent talking and thinking and feeling hurts. It’s hard to be grateful because you’re seeing so many reminders of how you weren’t the best person.
Come out of rehab with a pile of new tools and new ambition and if you’re serious about staying clean, you immediately set those tools to work and work them until they’re far from shiny. And everything’s great until you run into that first test: the part where you look at your life now and see someone else who didn’t just spend a few weeks in a mental and physical health bubble. You see them as being farther along as you. You see them having done things without you. You become aware that you’ve lost time and lost chances. You start to trade gratitude for what you have for the awareness of what you don’t. Having becomes lacking and you yeet gratitude out the window.
But you don’t have to. No one’s making you. It’s not a rule that you have to stop being grateful so that you can think about how someone else is doing something. It is such a challenge to find the gratitude among all the moments where you feel like everyone’s leagues ahead of you. It’s such a challenge to be grateful when you’re more aware of what you don’t have than what you do.
Hard challenges though have a way of producing exceptional rewards.
Is this a race?
Third, comparison can lead to an unhealthy sense of competition. Capitalism trains and traumatizes us to consider everyone doing the same sort of thing we’re doing as competition, as though there’s some great scarcity or rarity at the other end of whatever impending transaction. Basically it’s suggesting for writers that there’s a finite number of readers who can only own/read a finite number of books.
Is that accurate though? Yes, there’s a finite number of readers, but that’s still a pretty big number (it’s over 6 billion)* and it’s large enough that thinking your book doesn’t have the ability to reach some portion of that 6 billion is ridiculous.
*or did you only think about English-speaking Americans, Canadians, and Europeans?
Likewise, readers don’t only buy and then read one book at a time. There’s a reason why social media is so frequently littered with To-Be-Read lists or memes about all the books people own that they’ll never have time to read*.
*The reason they won’t have time to read rhymes with bapitalism.
So if there’s a large (and growing) number of readers and there’s no scarcity of books to make your book rare and urgent, why is everyone racing so hard to be done before everyone else?
Racing to the finish line makes sense when it’s a race and like Highlander there can be only one. Racing through your creative process to “beat” everyone else doesn’t do anything other than lead you to exhaustion. Your sales aren’t magically more numerous, your advances don’t suddenly gain some zeroes, you aren’t fast-tracked anywhere no matter how fast you were on the track.
Competition, be it with other writers or with yourself can be a motivator for people. They need to set that new benchmark, do better than other people, come out ahead. But that motivator is short-lived and ultimately toxic: what exactly is the prize you win for beating people who don’t know they’re competing with you? How is this not always going to set you up to measure your successes relative to theirs?
How are things, really?
Fourth: comparison can lead to a distorted sense of reality. There are a thousand filters and LUTs and sliders we can use to adjust the view of our lives. We can curate any number of sources to give people a view of our life and work and are so often rewarded for it by an algorithm eager for us to stay on a platform exposed to edited views of unreality.
You’re never going to know how things really are, as so many creatives protect their emotional vulnerabilities around their work, and people are encouraged more to talk about a view of how things are rather than the whole of how things are. Comparing your reality (since you know how life is) to someone else’s potential unreality (since we only know what we see, but can’t guarantee that what we’re seeing is legit), is never going to be accurate or useful.
So why do we do it?
Well, what other option do we have? The platforms don’t encourage honesty as much as they encourage use and shock, so all those photos of idyllic beaches and the food or happy dogs aren’t going to reveal how someone’s having a hard time or a bad day or having to work through things. There’s no mention of bad days amid all the manufactured smiles. Don’t let that polished finished curated image overcome your work-in-progress.
Next stop: Procrastination Station
Fifth, comparison can be a major source of procrastination. When we're constantly comparing ourselves to others, it’s easy to feel like we're not good enough or that we'll never measure up. From here it’s a short jump to stagnation and frustration, assuming that nothing you could ever do would ever measure up to everyone else and you’ll be forever behind. But there’s no basis for any of this. The competition you swear you’re losing, the “behind” you think you are, and the conclusion that there’s no hope or point to trying isn’t rooted in anything.
This isn’t global thermonuclear war where the best move is not to play, this is your creativity, your making things, something that you said was important to you, so why not do it because *you* want to do it?
Procrastinating only hurts the procrastinator. Work your work, at your own pace, no matter what everyone else is doing — how else are you planning on getting it done?
Take a week and do this
Let me leave you with some homework. If you get down on yourself, if you feel like you’re never getting anywhere, try this: Write yourself a list of your creative accomplishments. Not just the big things like “finished a book” but all the small things too like “remembered to save after writing the climax” and “successfully changed character names” and “wrote when I absolutely did not want to.”
Yes, this might mean you have a ridiculous sounding list of all these little things that you’re going to swear don’t matter alongside very few things that you’ll swear do matter and you won’t let yourself come to the realization that it all matters. The big stuff AND the little stuff, which is why it all goes on the list.
Try this every day for at least 3 days (like this coming weekend!), making a new list each day, and yes, things can carry over from day to day. If you’re not happy with your list, work on making it longer. Not to compete, not to outdo, just to do.
Unplug from comparison as best you can and you’ll watch your accomplishments stack higher than you expected. I’m not saying it’s easy, I’m not saying it’s not some damned hard work to do it, but disconnecting your success from comparing it to what other people are doing is a great secret weapon for your toolbox.
I’ll talk to you next week.
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Love you. Talk soon.