Nothing is more toxic to the soul than comparison.  

Glancing at the biographies of established writers, I feel myself infected with that familiar poison: by the time she was my age, Jodi Picoult was already married with children, had published several books, worked as a creative writing instructor at a private academy and English teacher at a public school, and earned her Bachelor’s from Princeton and her Master’s in Education from Harvard.  What have I done?  3 years ago, I was just discovering my love for writing and beginning to write everyday.  Now I write in my diary daily and publish weekly (or at least, theoretically) on my blog but have I written my great novel?  gotten a $40,000 advance?  worked for a newspaper?  published a book?  

As William Zinsser once said, the obsession with results is “a very American kind of trouble.  We are a culture that worships the end result: the league championship, the high test score.  Coaches are paid to win, teachers are valued for getting students into the best colleges.  Less glamorous gains made along the way—learning, wisdom, growth, confidence, dealing with failure—aren’t given the same respect because they can’t be given a grade.”  

I—like many writers—suffer from this American sort of trouble.  Goal-oriented and results-obsessed, I long to cross clear checkpoints on the route to my goal.  When I can’t, I feel like I haven’t accomplished anything at all.

For writers, this accomplishment-mania poses a major stumbling block.  Why?  Because most of our “accomplishments” can’t be recognized like an impressive degree in a gold frame.  Though outwardly, we’re still aspiring (or, to put it more bluntly, unpublished) writers, inwardly, we’ve accomplished so much: we’ve learned how to write stunning, spell-binding sentences, how to write clear, vigorous prose; we’ve learned how to order a piece, how to logically and sequentially organize our points for the most convincing effect; we’ve learned to appreciate the subtle differences in cadence and meaning between words; we’ve learned to write representationally: how to use figurative language—simile, metaphor, analogy—to more evocatively make a point, how to convey mood and tone.

But we can’t measure these achievements in checks on a to-do list or gold stars on a chart.  It’s for this reason that we possess a lingering self-doubt, that we don’t feel validated or “good enough.”  Like runners who can plot their mile times concretely on a graph, we want definite evidence of improvement.  Command of language, knack for startling metaphor: these things are intangible—they can’t be calculated, computed, converted to data points on a spreadsheet.  Like eyewitness testimony, our “progress” wouldn’t hold up in court.  

No, no to have made “real” headway on being a writer, we’d have to have 3 books to our credit, several dozen articles, countless readers. Just writing, we believe, doesn’t make us writers.  In the world, the guitarist who practices his scales 3 hours a day isn’t a “real” musician—only the one who’s in a band playing regular shows; the filmmaker who’s making an amateur documentary isn’t a “real” director—only the one with a finished product and set screening can rightfully hold such a prestigious title.  

I say screw the world.  At the end of the day, isn’t a real writer one who’s simply written?