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Impostor Syndrome, Writing

Impostor Me….

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Impostor Syndrome haunts writers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome

I was reminded of it by a brilliant cartoon in today’s newsletter from Hyperallergic.

I smiled at the punchline in the final box.

Once again, I’m feeling like an impostor, as I stumble around learning how to use Twitter and Instagram. I keep wondering: “What am I doing here? Will anything I post make a difference to anything?”

But, that’s part and parcel of being a writer. The world of writing and publishing thrives on creating doubt. Subscribe to one hundred newsletters from writing gurus and soon you’ll be inundated with advice on what you’re doing wrong…and, if you simply pay £450 for a weekend residential course, all of your errors will be chased away.

What a writer desires is some form of validation. Things get so uncertain, that we analyse the language used in rejection letters for solace!

I come alive when I write more of my WIP, which is how I know I’m real and not an impostor. Tweeting and posting on social media is restrictive and repetitive, as I tailor my words to have an effect—which makes me feel like a con man—get the punters’ confidence and maybe they’ll buy my books!

Impostor me…sort of.

How about you?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Schwartz_(author)

Self-Promotion, Twitter, Writing

Should Your Lead Character Have A Twitter Account?

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A few months ago, I suggested the idea of giving your main character their own email account:

https://paulpens.cloudaccess.host/?s=Protagonist+email+account

Recently, I’ve been exploring Twitter, seeking out Colony members and Crime genre authors and literary agents who like crime novels. I intended to use this personal account to make contacts and to promote myself and my Cornish Detective series in a non-pushy way.

My Twitter presence morphed from a Facebook Author page called Paul Pens, which is based on threads I started on The Colony. Last autumn, I started a Facebook business page devoted to my Cornish Detective series. Why not give my fictional hero a Twitter account too?

I searched for advice online, finding this dated article:

https://www.authormedia.com/lead-character-twitter-account/

Apparently, Twitter verifies the accounts of fictional characters, though this article is from 2012:

https://www.themarysue.com/twitter-verifies-fictional-character/

There are a lot of Marvel and DC superheroes and fictional heroes tweeting away, as are Homer J. Simpson, Charlie Brown and Lord Voldermort, so I may join in with Detective Chief Inspector Neil Kettle.

Have any of you given your MC a Twitter account?

Do you follow any fictional characters

Punctuation, YouTube

She wouldn’t get away with it today!

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We’ve previously discussed the semicolon in a couple of threads:

https://paulpens.cloudaccess.host/in-praise-of-the-semicolon/

https://paulpens.cloudaccess.host/semicolons-in-dialogue/

Today, while reading A Biography of Loneliness, by Fay Bound Alberti, I found a quote from Virginia Woolf’s A Writer’s Diary which she’d used as a chapter epigraph:

“I have entered into a sanctuary; a nunnery; had a religious retreat; of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call ‘reality’: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or the sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist.”

That’s a plethora of semicolons!

I felt bold when I once used two semicolons in a sentence.

Do you think she’d get away with it today?

Wouldn’t a 21st-century editor wield their red pen?