Am I Really a Writer? Impostor Syndrome and the Author

When I was studying photography in college, there was an ongoing debate among the students about when you were allowed to call yourself a photographer.

It could get surprisingly heated.

Some people thought you became a photographer when someone paid you for your work. But even that created another argument. Did one freelance job count? Did an agency have to hire you? How many paid jobs did you need before the title became legitimate?

Others believed exhibiting your work was the dividing line. Then came the obvious question: what kind of gallery counted? Did it have to be the Guggenheim, or could it be a gallery on Haight Street? What if you sold prints at a street fair? Was that enough?

Nobody ever settled it.

Years later, when I published my first book, I found myself having essentially the same argument—this time with myself.

Calling myself an author felt presumptuous.

I had written one book.

Was that enough?

Would I need to write three? Five? Ten? Did the books have to sell a certain number of copies? Did someone else have to start referring to me as an author before I was allowed to use the word myself?

And, perhaps more importantly, why did the title matter so much in the first place?

That uncomfortable little debate is one version of something psychologists have been studying for decades.

What is impostor syndrome?

The term most psychologists use is impostor phenomenon. It was introduced in 1978 by psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes after working with highly accomplished women who, despite strong evidence of competence and success, continued to believe they had somehow fooled other people into overestimating their abilities.

The contradiction is the important part.

The evidence says one thing.

Your internal assessment says something else.

You finish the manuscript, but tell yourself anybody could have done it. You get published, but assume you were lucky. Someone praises the work, and you discount the compliment. You receive an award, and suddenly the other nominees seem more deserving.

The American Psychological Association defines the impostor phenomenon as the experience of successful, accomplished people believing they are frauds who will eventually be exposed as incompetent. It is also important to say what it is not: it is not a formal psychiatric diagnosis.

For writers, the idea is especially easy to recognize.

Why are writers so good at moving the goalposts?

Because there is always another qualification available.

You wrote a short story.

But you haven’t written a book.

You wrote a book.

But it hasn’t been published.

It was published.

But you published independently.

A publisher accepted it.

But it wasn’t one of the Big Five.

Readers bought it.

But not enough readers.

You wrote another.

But you’re hardly Stephen King.

At some point, you have to notice what is happening.

The standard keeps moving because the standard was never really the problem.

This is what I was doing when I questioned whether one book made me an author. The book existed. That part wasn’t in dispute. The discomfort came from claiming the identity attached to it.

Photography had taught me the same lesson years earlier. We were searching for some external authority who could tell us when we had crossed an invisible line.

The funny thing was that no such authority existed.

How common are impostor feelings?

Common enough that psychologists have spent nearly five decades studying them, but the numbers deserve some caution.

A major systematic review of research on the impostor phenomenon found prevalence estimates ranging from 9% to 82%. That enormous spread reflects differences in the populations studied, the questionnaires researchers used, and the thresholds for what counted as significant impostor feelings. In other words, there is no single credible statistic that says “X percent of people have impostor syndrome.”

What the research does show consistently is that these feelings occur across genders, ages, professions, and levels of achievement.

And achievement itself does not necessarily make them disappear.

That may be the part writers need to hear most.

Haven’t successful writers already proven themselves?

You would think so.

But writers have been describing versions of this conflict long before we had a psychological term for it.

Virginia Woolf’s diaries are filled with swings between confidence and deep doubt about her ability to write. John Steinbeck repeatedly questioned whether his work was good enough even after completing books that would become part of the American literary canon.

Agatha Christie also wrote about losing confidence during the writing process—starting with an idea and enthusiasm, then gradually becoming convinced that the book wasn’t working as she had hoped.

And Neil Gaiman has spoken directly about impostor syndrome. In a 2017 account, he described attending a gathering filled with accomplished artists, scientists, and other remarkable people and feeling that at any moment someone would discover he didn’t really belong there.

We should be careful not to retroactively diagnose historical writers. Woolf, Steinbeck, and Christie were writing about doubt, insecurity, and fear of inadequacy, not using a modern clinical label.

But the experience they describe is familiar.

Success did not eliminate uncertainty.

Sometimes it simply gave the uncertainty a larger stage.

Why might writing make this particularly difficult?

There is no good evidence that authors experience impostor feelings more frequently than everyone else, so we shouldn’t claim that they do.

But writing does have some peculiar characteristics that make doubt easy to cultivate.

First, there is no objective measure of quality.

A builder can measure whether a wall is straight. An accountant can determine whether the numbers balance. A writer can spend three days wondering whether one paragraph works.

Editors disagree.

Reviewers disagree.

Readers disagree.

Even the author may disagree with themselves six months later.

Then there is the private nature of the work. Writers see every failed version before anyone else sees the finished book. We remember the chapter we threw away, the plot that went nowhere, the sentence we rewrote fifteen times, and the month when nothing seemed to work.

Readers see the completed book.

We remember the construction site.

That difference matters.

Doesn’t self-doubt improve the work?

It can.

A certain amount of doubt is part of craft.

It makes you question the easy solution, rewrite a weak scene, hire an editor, check your facts, or finally cut the chapter you love but know doesn’t belong.

The problem begins when the question changes.

“Is this chapter good enough?” is useful.

“Who am I to be writing this?” is not.

One gives you something to work on.

The other puts the entire writer on trial.

That distinction is worth learning because writers often mistake one for the other.

What does psychology tell us about the downside?

Research has linked stronger impostor feelings with anxiety, depression, lower self-esteem, and reduced psychological well-being. The original Clance and Imes work also described anxiety, lack of confidence, depression, and frustration among people experiencing the phenomenon.

That does not mean normal creative doubt is an illness, nor does it mean every writer who questions themselves needs treatment.

It does mean there is no particular virtue in suffering.

We sometimes romanticize artistic insecurity as though feeling inadequate is proof that someone takes the work seriously.

It isn’t.

Doubt is not evidence of talent.

It is also not evidence of a lack of talent.

It’s information about how you feel, not necessarily about the quality of what you made.

Does publication make the feeling go away?

Not necessarily.

Publication often just gives the mind new material.

Before the book is published, you wonder whether you’re a real writer.

After publication, you wonder whether you’re a real author.

After the second book, you wonder whether either one is any good.

A good review arrives, and you think the reviewer was being generous.

A bad review arrives, and somehow that one becomes irrefutable evidence.

This is one of the traps of impostor thinking: positive evidence is negotiable. Negative evidence is treated as fact.

If you don’t recognize that pattern, there is no achievement large enough to finally settle the argument.

Is this different for independent authors?

There is not enough research to say that independent authors experience more impostor feelings than traditionally published authors.

But independent publishing does remove some of the familiar external checkpoints.

There may be no agent saying yes.

No acquisitions editor selecting the manuscript.

No traditional publishing house placing its name on the spine.

The author makes the decision to publish.

For some people, that freedom introduces another uncomfortable question:

Who gave me permission?

Nobody.

That is one of the defining features of independent publishing.

The absence of a gatekeeper does not mean the work required less effort. The author still wrote, revised, edited, designed, published, marketed, and put the work in front of readers.

The route changed.

The work did not magically disappear.

So when can you call yourself a writer?

I have a much simpler answer now than I did when I was arguing about photographers in college.

If you write, you’re a writer.

If you have written and published a book, “author” is not an honorary title someone else has to confer on you.

It describes what you did.

You can add qualifiers if they’re useful—novelist, memoirist, poet, historian, nonfiction author, independent author—but you don’t have to earn the basic word over and over again.

That does not mean every book is good.

It doesn’t mean every writer has mastered the craft.

And it certainly doesn’t mean the work is finished simply because you’ve claimed the title.

It means you stop confusing professional growth with permission to exist in the profession.

What actually helps?

Psychologists and educators working with impostor feelings commonly recommend recognizing the pattern, talking openly about it, challenging distorted assessments of your own competence, and paying attention to actual evidence rather than automatically discounting it. Stanford’s guidance, for example, encourages people to reflect on setbacks without allowing them to define their abilities and to recognize how common feelings of not belonging can be.

For writers, that evidence can be very ordinary.

The manuscript you finished.

The second draft that was better than the first.

The reader who wrote to you.

The bookstore that carried your book.

The editor who pushed you.

The rejection you survived.

The next book you started.

None of those things proves that you will become famous.

They prove that you’re doing the work.

And perhaps that is the more useful standard.

Not whether the Guggenheim hung your photographs.

Not whether a major agency hired you.

Not whether the book hit a bestseller list.

Not whether you’ve written one book or twenty.

The question I was trying to answer in college was when do I get to call myself one?

I think I had it backwards.

The title wasn’t something waiting at the end of the road.

It described the road I was already on.