How To Use Jealousy To Your Advantage
Turn it into hope.
Hope is a pretty undervalued aspect of writing. It can't do the work for you, but it can make the work go a helluva lot more smoothly.
I rely a great deal upon hope to make a living with my writing. When I look ahead to my future, if I don't hold onto a hefty dose of hope, I’ll drown in anxiety. Without hope, I worry about what I'm going to write next. And I can't even imagine doing what I'm doing for another week. Not to mention another month or more.
The truth, of course, is that I've been writing like this for about 16 months.
And I constantly think to myself that there's no way I can keep coming up with new stories. But I keep doing it anyway.
Here's the thing. It's really easy to freeze up in uncertainty and feel helpless. It's even worse when you start looking around at what everybody else is doing. And then you begin to feel that all-too familiar feeling of jealousy.
You look at your work, and then you look at theirs. You see other writers making better money than you or enjoying greater opportunities. You wish you knew how to do what they're doing. Maybe it starts to feel a little unfair.
