I had a massive case of imposter syndrome.

Words Count | Sonal Champsee's Writer Therapy

On Writer Therapy

Growing up, no one ever told me I should be a writer. It’s not the kind of thing desi parents tell their children, and nothing they’d ever want to admit to their friends—unless you were a successful writer, in which case they will tell everyone. There is no pressure like desi parent pressure; either I had to succeed, or I had to deal with constant dismissal and questioning about why I would want to waste my time with writing in the hopes I would quit and do something more socially acceptable. When this didn’t work and I began an MFA in my mid-30s, this evolved into writing advice from my mother, the assumption being that I couldn’t possibly be any good or succeed at this without her help, despite her never having written in her life.

I’m much better than I used to be at ignoring my mother, but anyone who writes can probably already see the problem this kind of internalized pressure puts on a newer writer. All first drafts are terrible and all first drafts by newer writers are usually extra-terrible, and so between never feeling like my work was good enough and my then-undiagnosed ADHD, I was the writer who never wrote.

I could pretend this was okay until Sarah Selecky asked me to teach for her, and I had to talk to a class about writing while practicing so little of it and having no street cred as a writer beyond being in my first year of an MFA program. At best, I could bask in Sarah’s street cred as the author of highly lauded stories and books, who had taught for years and more importantly, wrote regularly. She had a whole daily routine and ritual around writing, whereas I had frenzied attempts to get something on paper when I had MFA assignments due, and long stretches of nothing but good intentions and reality TV in between.

In my first class, one of my students was the partner of a person in my MFA program. I didn’t know him, since he was a few years ahead of me, but I was absolutely terrified that she would see right through me and tell her partner, who would of course tell everyone in the program, including the professors. Who the heck does she think she is, teaching writing when she’s barely a writer herself? I would become the laughingstock of the program, a story so ludicrous that it would be shared for years as an MFA urban legend and would be whispered around CanLit anytime I attempted to do anything.

In short, I had a massive case of imposter syndrome.

My hope was that I could quickly overcome this by learning everything I possibly could so that I could churn out perfect stories in a single draft, get a lot of things published, fast, win awards, sign a book deal, and ultimately have a long CV of things that would convince my students, my classmates, Canlit, my parents and myself that I was legitimately a writer. This didn’t work out very well, since not only was this an impossible task for any writer but also required me to actually write.

So I leaned heavily into the one thing I knew I was good at—critique. I critiqued the hell out of every MFA classmate. Sarah’s school emphasized positive feedback, but for the final assignment, the doors were open to critical review, and I went above and beyond. I made line notes, asked detailed questions, did character assessments, broke down stories structurally, going deep and explaining everything carefully with many notes and comments about things I liked, so it would be clear I was trying to improve the story and not rip the writer apart. Newer writers are thirsty sponges for good feedback. Most people were grateful for my efforts, but I have a hunch I overwhelmed them.

To prove I was legitimately a writer and writing teacher, I critiqued like a motherfucker in my roles as an instructor, MFA student, reader for the PRISM international editorial board, participant in a novel class, and among writer friends. But eventually my massively detailed feedback coupled with my undiagnosed ADHD meant that I not only struggled to write but also to critique. Surely, owning my own legitimacy as a writer and writing teacher had to be less work.

By my third year of teaching, I was fed up. The MFA was nearly over; only my thesis was left, which I was mostly not writing, and I could no longer dodge questions about my writing routine by saying I was too busy with coursework. Plus, I was becoming deeply uncomfortable that I was not presenting myself honestly.  What was the point of spending years in therapy successfully banishing from my head every desi parent’s favourite refrain "What will people think?” only to maintain a façade in the classroom?

Teaching and writing arise from the same source for me. Since my writing is better when I am true to myself on the page. I knew I now had to be true to myself in class to be a better teacher.

Being true to myself meant telling my students that I struggled to sit down and write. My classes were taught online, and for a brief moment before I pressed ‘post’ it felt a little risky. Would the students see this and immediately demand to be taught by a real writer instead?

But I knew I was a writer.

Nearly every writer has felt at times that they could not legitimately call themselves a writer.  Nearly every writer has struggled to write. There is no magic switch that gets set to ‘legitimate writer’ that makes any of the challenges with actually writing vanish.

Once my hesitation passed, I told the students everything. I told them that I’d tried and failed to maintain a writing routine dozens of times. I told them that I was an unabashedly lazy writer who avoided revision because it seemed like too much work. I told them that I desperately wanted to succeed, and while I was more confident now, I was very familiar with feeling like an imposter.

And then a wonderful thing happened. Once I stopped trying to prove myself to them, they stopped trying to prove themselves to me. We collectively relaxed and came into class as our real selves. They started admitting to all their writerly fears and bad habits—the  perfectionism, the worry that nobody wants to hear their stories, the feeling that they’re not good enough, the belief that they did not deserve to be writers. We still talked about craft, but the more interesting conversations were about everything that got in the way of being a writer. After our discussions wrapped up, the conversations continued in my head, forming and re-forming into different ways to explain things and encourage them, experiences of mine they could relate to, different metaphors I could use, or ways I could help them laugh their fears into something smaller. Often, the thoughts I had could be so compelling that I’d go back to our online discussion and write out long posts or long emails to the student directly. I still struggled to find motivation for my own creative work but unasked for writing advice? This was worth putting everything else aside to do.

Writer Therapy

A few years later, it occurred to me that other people might benefit from this advice, and the idea for my newsletter Writer Therapy was born where I write about writing problems and invite readers looking for writing advice to submit their questions. It’s like Dear Abby for writers but supportive and judgement free, and also I swear a lot.

In encouraging other writers to trust themselves and be honest on the page, I discovered the most useful thing I could do as a writing teacher was not teaching craft but legitimizing every student as a real writer. It was the antithesis of everything I had been raised with, to see everyone who wanted to write as a writer, regardless of their CV or the number of times they passed over writing in favour of reality TV. So much of how I teach and write has become a reflection of what I’ve learned as an adult, to trust my instincts and stand in my own truth, and not squash everything down over fears about what people might think.

And in doing this with my writing students, their writing got better.

The craft of writing isn’t hard, in the sense that it doesn’t take a lot of craft knowledge to write a competent story. Getting deep and nerdy about craft and looking at all the ways it can be stretched and pulled in service of the story can be fun, but it’s not always necessary for newer writers to know until they hit upon a particular craft issue in their writing.

Creative writers work in the realm of uncertainty. Most of us aren’t really taught to be comfortable with uncertainty. Sometimes that can be fun, to experiment, to play, to see what comes next, to not know what’s going to happen when we commit words to a blank page. Even if we’ve preplanned the story to death, the story may still pull us in unknown directions, or weird surprises may pop up that we don’t understand except that the story wants it there. More experienced writers learn to trust in their instincts, that feeling you get when you’ve tapped into something interesting even if you don’t quite know what to do with it yet—at least most of the time. But newer writers are so full of self-doubt about whether they are writing correctly, whether they’ve succeeded enough, or whether or not they are even writers—that they push away from their own creative instincts. What if I follow this idea and it leads nowhere? What if the story gets irreparably mucked up? What if it’s stupid and I become the laughingstock of every writer in this class? What will people think? And so they squash their own voices and write things they think will be acceptable to everyone around them, and then wonder why their stories don’t quite sing.

These days, there is so much writing advice out there that dictates how a writer is supposed to be, and how they ought to work, and what it should look like. It’s hard to dive into this uncertain thing and not know if it will work, especially when the world doesn’t make it easy for us to write and questions our lack of conventional success—even though conventional success in writing is an incredibly uncertain thing itself. And while at least some of this advice comes from people with more street cred than my mother, the fact that it’s so often prescriptive is problematic.

There’s no one way to write. And the only thing you need to be a writer is the desire to do it. One day, maybe even desi parents will think so.

Sonal Champsee’s (she/her) short fiction and essays have been published in anthologies and magazines such as The New Quarterly, Ricepaper, and Today’s Parent. Her novel-in-progress, Everyone Can’t Be Wrong, was shortlisted for the 2022 UBC/HarperCollins Canada Best New Fiction prize. Sonal holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a creative writing instructor for the Sarah Selecky Writing School. Sonal lives in Toronto with her partner, two small children and two medium-sized cats.

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