Month: March 2025

The Ego in Writing

Years ago, a forty-something friend went to an open workshop at his local library. This friend had been heavily published, worked as a writing mentor, and knew as much (if not more) about writing than most people in the industry.

He said he was petrified as he handed in his work. He was worried what people would say.

Then somebody else came in – a twenty-year-old who handed in his piece, and behaved so cocky he was bordering on arrogance.

My friend didn’t get it – how could he be so afraid of what the workshop would say when somebody with an iota of his experience was so confident?

It puzzled me for a while. Why such different attitudes? Surely the writer with all that experience and skill should be cocky, and the inexperienced writer should be insecure. That’s how it would work in any other field.

But eventually I realised the weird dichotomy at work.

The inexperienced writer knows very little. They’re confident in their writing to the point of obliviousness. Often, they just don’t know enough to see that there might be problems with their writing.

My friend, with all his experience in the industry, knew not only what might be wrong, but that there might even be stuff he hadn’t considered.

Writing’s a strange craft where the more you improve, the more experience you gain, the more insecure you grow.

That’s not such a bad thing, though.

Especially in dealing with feedback.

As much as that fear and insecurity might terrify us, it can – and should – drive us to improve.

It’s worth seriously considering every bit of feedback we receive. We don’t have to take it on, although if we do reject it, we need to measure whether we have a valid argument for rejecting it, or we’re rejecting it out of ego because we want to protect our own self-image.

As an aside, when we receive feedback, we don’t have to consider it literally. For example, a feedbacker might comment on a particular plot point. Now we might acknowledge there’s a problem, but instead come up with a different way to remedy it.

There’s a beauty in revision that opens boundless possibilities – ways to not only improve our work, but our skills as a writer.

So when it comes to writing, sometimes we have to put our ego to one side.

And ride the fear to something better.