Write With the Confidence of a Mediocre White Man

Your work is at least as good as “John’s”, I promise

Dr. Casey Lawrence
Bitchy
Published in
8 min readOct 13, 2024

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Photo by Rashtravardhan Kataria on Unsplash

There are days when I feel like everything I write sucks. My perfectionism gets the better of me and I want to throw in the towel, thinking, I’m a terrible writer. It’s so easy for everyone else, and I’m struggling to string a sentence together!

Of course, it isn’t easy for everyone else. Imposter Syndrome — the feeling like everyone else has their shit together and you’re just faking it — can strike any of us at any time. I have a PhD in English literature and three published novels, and it still happens to me.

If it happens to you, too, I promise, you’re a better writer than you think. If you’re putting in even an ounce of effort, your work is probably already ten times better than the trash getting published by overconfident white men.

Whenever I doubt my abilities, I remember that John Boyne put monsters from a video game into his 2020 historical novel, A Traveler at the Gates of Wisdom, and I can’t help but laugh:

The dyes that I used in my dressmaking were composed from […] nightshade, sapphire, keese wing, the leaves of the silent princess plant, Octorok eyeball, swift violet, thistle and hightail lizard. In addition, for the red I had used for Abrila’s dress, I…

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Dr. Casey Lawrence
Bitchy

Canadian author of three LGBT YA novels. PhD from Trinity College Dublin. Check out my lists for stories by genre/type.