“If you’re horrible to me, I’m going to write a song about it, and you won’t like it.”

~Taylor Swift

You’re talented. Amazingly strong. You’ve overcome more in the past ten days than some people do in a lifetime. You know what you know, and you’re great at what you’re great at. You’re on a mission! So, why the high-stakes fear? Have haters from the past taken up space in your head? I’m a newbie. A fraud. Ill prepared. Or perhaps you’ve published before, but worry you’re not meant for more . . .

It’s time to silence the lies—your own or those from ignorant people who once declared your ineptitude. Everyone starts off a beginner, right? Get ready to hush the negative voices by seeing how the pros overcome imposter syndrome. Also, studying the right books will magically bolster your confidence. Take it from me. Those voices were loud, and I needed help!

“Whatcha get on your SATs, Linda?” Uh-oh.

When it came to sitting down and writing my book, thrilling dreams and early enthusiasm weren’t enough. Several naysayers in my head—the ghosts of high school Mean Girls—loomed large.

Place: Los Altos High School, the quad.

Time: Senior year.

Mood: Fucked.

Our lunch break almost over, my classmates and I milled around, waiting to enter the main auditorium to vote for Senior Superlatives. Four smarty-pants girls from a wealthier part of town sat in front of me, pompous smugness coloring their faces. They knew full well I hadn’t excelled on my SATs. Surely, they’d seen the class rankings just printed and posted, with my name recorded for posterity in the bottom third.

It didn’t help that one of them got all giggly around Jeff, my boyfriend. How was I to know he’d said no to her invitation to attend last year’s Sadie Hawkins dance to go with me—a girl from the low-life flats, who was shallow enough to be a pom-pom girl and whose biggest career plan was to enroll in Foothill Junior College in the fall?

My SAT numbers? The nerve! Crap. Think fast, Linda. You can’t tell them you got a 980! Don’t they give you something like 400 points just for getting your name right?

“Umm. I got 1253,” I replied casually before sauntering off to join a clique of lovable misfits. My people. I could hear laughter behind me and turned to see the girls shaking their heads. One jumped up and ran to Jeff’s group; fun-loving jokesters clumped together like partridges in the grass. When their covey all turned my way and busted a gut in unison, I thought, Oh, this isn’t good.

What had I done wrong? I slow-motion replayed the last two minutes, reliving every word and facial expression. I’d answered their SAT question quickly enough, with an air of nonchalance . . . hadn’t I?

Lee Child, creator of the Jack Reacher book series. With over 100 million copies sold, Jack Reacher—which has also been adapted for both the big screen (starring Tom Cruise) and streaming television—is the “strongest brand in publishing,” according to Forbes magazine.

I grew up in a city [Birmingham] that was rough and tough—this was a long time ago. Society was totally different and emotionally, very inarticulate. Nobody could express themselves. We resolved things by fighting. It was just like breathing. On top of that, my folks were very ambitious for us. They wanted us to have what they did not have, a good education and to do well. When you’re in a city like that in a school like I was in, that’s like having a target on your back. You are too big for your boots. You’re above yourself. There is no worse sin in Britain than being above yourself. So, I was constantly fighting.

Deepak Chopra, author of ninety-two books, including Quantum Healing, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, and Metahuman, and Fellow of the American College of Physicians.

I used to debate the haters, but I’ve let that go. If you have the voice of the bully or mean reviewers in your head and you want to be independent of their criticism, you also have to be independent of flattery because they’re equally dangerous. You become totally dependent for validation, and then you’re either instantly flattered or perennially offended for the rest of your life. And that’s not a good way to live.

Leeza Gibbons, Emmy Award–winning talk show host, celebrated radio host, Hollywood correspondent on Entertainment Tonight and Extra, and author of two New York Times bestsellers, Take 2 and Fierce Optimism.

You really do have to love your haters. You just do. There will always be people who don’t get you or who go out of their way to try and make you feel bad. I would get tripped up along the way, but I always came back to this: “I believe in me.” My parents told me to believe in me because they believed in me. I’m sure you’ve experienced people who don’t believe in what you’re doing, who don’t see the vision. And maybe you haven’t taught them how to receive you because you haven’t yet stepped into your authenticity.

It didn’t occur to me that my authenticity as an intellectual genius was so easy to question, dressed as I was in dolphin shorts and tank tops on cold foggy mornings. (How’s a sixteen-year-old supposed to know that she’s unconsciously trying to keep people’s eyes away from her frizzy hair and crooked teeth? I mean, I didn’t get braces or start reading self-help until college.) Although my natural-high self was as unlikely to be voted “heartiest partier” as “most likely to succeed,” I should have suspected I wouldn’t be excluded from the ballot. After being voted “Biggest BSer” of our class twenty minutes later, it hit me that SAT scores must not use odd numbers and probably end in tens. Why did I say 1253 and not 1260?!

By far, the deeper disappointment about being labeled our school’s Biggest Bullshitter—on card-stock keepsake posters, no less—was that I felt I’d disrespected my father, who’d taken an oath in his twenties never to tell a lie, and which inspired him to say, “My, that is a baby!” or “Quite a haircut you’ve got there!” when pushed beyond silence.

I felt sick I’d dishonored Dad’s commitment to honesty to save face, only to have it blow up spectacularly in my face. As a full-out daddy’s girl, I never wanted to take his unconditional love for granted, especially when I did crap like read Linda Goodman’s Sun Signs until two the night before a math test and then bring home a D on my report card. I suppose the fact that I woke up smiling every morning at six gave him hope; we could barely drag Carol and her straight-A’s out of bed after her fourth push of the snooze button. If Dad could believe in me so unflinchingly, then damn it, I would too.

Valarie Kaur

Ever since I was a kid and heard my first racial slurs, I have noticed this voice in me I call “The Little Critic.” So many of us, especially people of color, hear this voice. You are not smart enough. Not good enough. Not strong enough. Not white enough. Not American enough. I feel like my life has been this power struggle between the critic that wants to make me small (who’s just trying to protect me because it is unsafe), and this wise woman, the warrior in me, who says, “Oh, my love. You are brave enough.”

Poet Audre Lorde said, “We can learn how to mother ourselves,” so I say to myself, “Breathe, my love. Push to show up one more time, one more day.”

In my first meetings with my publisher, Chris Jackson, I felt like I had impostor syndrome. Like, “I can’t be worthy.” I’m ashamed to say that it lasted a long time. Anytime I missed a deadline, or I didn’t feel like the pages I sent over to him were good enough, I’d think, “Is this worthy of him?” He never gave me any reason to feel that way, and instead, at almost every turn, Chris was holding up a mirror to superpowers I couldn’t see.

There’s a line from an old Hindi film that keeps coming back to me: “When my faith falters, I will have faith in your faith in me.”

Nell Scovell

The only way to move forward creatively is to allow yourself to be judged. I think that trips up women more than men. In general, people don’t love being criticized. And when people ask me for advice, I always say, “Try to see feedback as constructive, not critical. Use feedback to make yourself a better writer, or to make yourself more confident that what you did evoked the response you wanted.”

Fearing the blank page is like fearing an empty dog dish. It’s just something you fill every day. I’ll be honest, being a professional writer since 1981, the year I started getting paid, I still marvel at how bad my first drafts are. You would think by now I’d be over that. And yet, I finally figured out that’s the process. I can’t tell you how many notebooks I have filled with ideas for stories and plays and screenplays and pilots and articles that never panned out. But if you enjoy the process, you’re ahead of the game.

Buoyed by parental and mystical support, it felt as if my writing destiny was reasonably goof-proof. But how to beef up my intellectual confidence to nullify any internal bullies that might remain? Dad said that the world’s most successful people had one thing in common: They were big readers. Perhaps everything I needed to know was just a page away? With the help of a brainiac clerk at Book-star on Ventura Boulevard, three titles made my Linda University Reading List.

Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, a slender prescriptive guide, gifted me pearls like the difference between hyphens and dashes and avoiding the rookie error of weighing down text with filler words (“so,” “just,” “like,” “that,” “really,” “very,” and “pretty”). I mined that baby night and day and must’ve read this passage twenty times: “A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.” Yikes! Will it surprise you to learn that I still struggle with this?

The Chicago Manual of Style, one of the most widely respected manuals for usage and grammar, stressed the importance of brevity (double yikes!), where ellipses go, and how to punctuate abbreviations and quotations. Use numerals or spell out numbers? According to CMS, you spell out numbers from zero to one hundred; starting with 101, you use the numeral. What happens when you write a paragraph with “mixed numbers”—some above 101 and some below 100? In that case, you should express all the numbers in that paragraph as numerals. (Sheesh. Pull that one out at parties; it’s a real crowd-pleaser.)

Julia Cameron’s aforementioned The Artist’s Way sent me on regular Wednesday Artist Dates to French cafés, bookstores, and parks, where I performed confidence rituals under redwood trees (you shoulda been there). Armed for hours with a journal, my favorite blue ballpoint, and an open itinerary, I followed Julia’s instruction to spark whimsy and create a sense of playfulness. Hump Day couldn’t come fast enough. I was becoming an artist!

To ensure I never missed an inspiration, I stashed paper and pens everywhere—my car, bathroom drawer, by the bed, in my dog-walking pouch. The world was my canvas, and words, my constant companion. With each hour of self-study and time spent living “as if,” my self-esteem as a writer blossomed, and those Mean Girl voices of yore grew fainter.

Maybe this was how they did it—all those bestselling authors? Using their fear, pain, or shame as fuel, they improved their art and odds. I loved the idea of learning how to write a book by turning to books, the hunt of it, and could feel myself getting smarter, braver, every day. I knew that as long as I stayed motivated, my future success was largely up to me.

Cheryl Strayed

One of my few rituals is that almost always before I start writing, I’ll peruse my shelf and pick up a book, usually poetry, and read a little something. A snippet, a page, a few poems, just to shift my brain into that other place where we make language on the page. It’s really helpful. I think we need each other. We stand on the backs of those writers who came before us. I always feel that I couldn’t write without that reading, without that place that’s made when you read language you love.

Tim Grahl, managing partner and publisher at Story Grid Universe and author of Your First 1000 Copies, Book Launch Blueprint, Running Down a Dream, and the young adult novel, The Threshing.

I told all of my friends to buy and read a copy of Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art because it was the first time somebody put into words what we were struggling with. I’ve been in therapy for years now, and I’ve learned that you can’t solve a problem that doesn’t have a name. Until you can take something and set it out on the table and talk about it and not feel like it’s just this mess inside of yourself, you’re never going fix anything. Steven’s book gave me the name “Resistance.” The stories he tells made me think: This is the thing that’s been destroying me! That did the dual thing of 1) giving me a problem to solve, and 2) making me feel less crazy and less alone because I am the king of the mental bullies. I can out-bully anyone in my head.

Steven Pressfield

I read the same things over and over. The great books are like a wonderful healthy vegetable juice, whereas some of the bad stuff is like junk food. I go back to the same movies, the same books. I don’t know why. I think it’s a deficiency of imagination on my part. A lot of my work is based on the ancient Greeks. Go back and just name any of them—Thucydides, Herodotus, Plato, Euripides, Xenophon, Herodotus—they were so clear-minded. There’s no neurosis or modern poisons in there.

The two writers who have most influenced me in the book world are Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller. There’s a compilation of Hemingway’s wisdom called Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips, who culled nuggets from A Moveable Feast and a number of other books by the master. As for Henry Miller, he’s one of my heroes. He struggled for so long and was so true to his own star and such an original. I used to sit at the typewriter and literally copy pages from Miller and Hemingway—I mean pages and pages—just to try and understand what they were doing and how they did it, and to get the feeling of a writer who really had a voice.

As I write this, over three hundred thousand books are published every year in the United States by traditional publishers, with another one million self-published, leading me to believe that at least as many mental bullies are being silenced. Let’s jump ahead for a full-circle moment at my twenty-year high school reunion, where the meanest of the smarty-pants girls came unglued.

In a surprise twist, our senior high school class president, John (who got a perfect 1600 on his SATs and was there on the quad’s grassy knoll the day of my cruddy score fib), sent our graduating class a mass email labeled: “Top 18 Reasons to Attend” our Los Altos High twenty-year reunion. Before the final bullet on the list (“If you are there, you, too, will be popular”) was mention of me! In a move Daddy cheered from his deathbed, John declared that I was now a “noted speaker and bestselling author of Lives Charmed,” with my website address included, proof for any naysayers.

Jesse and I walked into the reunion hotel ballroom, and I couldn’t sit down without being interrupted. I couldn’t dance. Or eat. It was like I was a bride or a visiting dignitary. At one point, my classmates stood three-deep to shake my hand or hug me. Was it possible I now lived in a world where I was the smart girl, worthy of intellectual discourse? Up was down, day was night, dogs were sleeping with cats! Even the smarty-pants girls came over to congratulate me. Well, all but one of them.

“Um, Linda,” she hedged when I walked up to say hello. “So, when you write a book for a publisher, do they hire somebody to clean up your work after you’re done with it?” Her eyes were darting about like pinballs. Clearly code for: But I thought you were too ignorant to write a term paper, much less a book!

“Well, every book goes through a copy-editing phase,” I said. “Mine included. But I’ve done that, too—cleaned up other people’s work for a publisher.” SPG’s mouth gaped open, her forehead crinkling. Clearly, I, a Bear of Little Brain, had failed to comprehend her. She tried again.

“No, what I mean is—” she continued, certain I’d misunderstood, “when you write a book for a publisher, there are other people present to clean up your stuff when you’re done, right?”

Good Lord, after all these years, she was still going out of her way to try to prove me ignorant! Then it hit me: It was in part because of her criticism that I’d worked so hard to rewrite my history, leapfrog over my limitations, and believe in myself when others wouldn’t or couldn’t. I wanted to thank her for being so blatantly transparent. I see your disbelief, and I raise you my hard-earned self-esteem, girlfriend. Any residual shame I carried about my low SAT scores evaporated as if hit by a master delete key.

Go to those reunions, you guys. Ya never know. (Although, after writing this, I’m now a little nervous to go to any future ones!)

And know this: Every bestselling author, whether voted “Best Smile” or “Most Likely to End Up on America’s Most Wanted,” succeeded because they overrode their hesitancy.

Anne Lamott, author of one of the most successful writing books ever, Bird by Bird. Her other bestsellers include Operating Instructions, Almost Everything, Help Thanks Wow, Grace (Eventually), Dusk Night Dawn, and Traveling Mercies, as well as several novels.

E. L. Doctorow put it so beautifully. He said, “Writing is like driving at night with the headlights on. You can only see a little ways in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.” And I don’t believe that for a second because I have a raging anxiety disorder. I like to know where I’m going to end up, what I’ll see along the way, how I’ll feel at each stage, and when the hell I can get home, which is secretly the only place I ever want to be.

I got sober thirty-plus years ago, and for the first four or five years, I thought of it as practicing having feelings without thinking about killing myself, or suppressing them, or rewriting them. I was a victim of extreme bullying because of this crazy, frizzy hair. I was way too smart and way too sensitive. It was all about trying to cover that up, armor it, or burnish the surface. Those were the only operating instructions I had. Little by little, I started to realize that we’re all in the same boat. You hear when you first get sober, “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.” But that took me years to believe because I’d see people with silky, long, smooth hair or beautiful teeth, and I’d think, What kind of problems could you have if your hair looked like that? But I realized that we had all become clenched in terror of falling and landing on our butts or having people see our deepest, truest, inside self.

I always tried to emulate people I thought had the secret launch codes. When I was first becoming a writer, I wanted to write like Isabel Allende, or Ann Beattie, or John Updike, because they had the codes. My fourth book, All New People, was my first sober book. About that time, I realized I didn’t have to squinch and clench and burnish the surface and pretend to be smarter and more evolved than I am. That I just needed to, bird by bird, tell the truth in my own voice.

Marie Forleo, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Everything is Figureoutable, based on her concept from Oprah’s SuperSoul Sessions. Founder of the online business program B-School, MarieTV, and The Marie Forleo Podcast.

I am a creative machine. If you remove one part of me, it’s not going to stop me. It’s going to take a lot more than a [recent] hysterectomy to slow me down. That said, I felt really insecure about my writing. One thing that helped me while writing Everything Is Figureoutable was to continue the practice of not editing as I went. I had to keep reminding myself, “Marie, it’s okay. Get it all down. It doesn’t have to be even remotely ‘perfect’ at this point. Even if this paragraph doesn’t connect with the last one, or we don’t know if this will wind up in the book.” The more I gave myself permission to get everything down on the page, the better.

My greatest confidence boost ironically came from a minimum-wage job. At the Bodhi Tree, one of the most popular spiritual bookstores in the world, we were always hosting some marquee author for a party or signing. Intimidating—or so you’d think. Yet, I couldn’t believe the disconnects I witnessed—the self-help divas who behaved appallingly because they could; the wealth gurus who drove up in shitty cars; and the always bizarre relationship “experts” going through yet another nasty, public divorce. It was comical and hard to know whose currency to trust.

I didn’t yet know what I’d write, but my desire to become an author was growing, as was my fascination with those already living the dream while truly walking their talk.

“After shelving thousands of books for you, Stan,” I said one day to the co-owner, “and meeting many celeb writers here, I’ve realized something.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

“I didn’t think I was smart enough to write a book. But now I see that there’s no way every one of these thirty thousand titles on your shelves is written by someone smarter, funnier, or more deserving than me. Statistically, that’s not even possible!”

Stan laughed. “You’re 100 percent right about that,” he said.

To this day, Stan says that my signing for Lives Charmed, the book I was struggling to birth here, remains “one of the biggest selling events” of the Bodhi Tree’s forty-year history.

Remember that the next time you feel unqualified!

Tomi Adeyemi

There was a period when Children of Blood and Bone was out to different publishers. Choosing a publisher is as stressful and important as choosing the right person to adapt a project. If you’re strong-willed, your hands are still on the steering wheel, but then twelve other people jump into a four-seat car, and everyone wants to play a different song.

But Sabaa [Tahir] told me something crucial when I asked if I could pick her brain and use her as a mentor. That moment unlocked the beast within me. At the end of a two-hour call, Sabaa said, “And, Tomi?”

“Yeah?”

“MAKE THEM PAY!”

I remember it viscerally, the unlock button going off. The permission to value my worth and believe in my story. Now that I have a career, I still find myself repeatedly activating those buttons, turning those switches because, as creatives, we come from a beggar’s mentality. As a woman, a marginalized woman, it’s easy to feel lucky just to be able to breathe this air. But no. I had to adopt the mentality that, “No. I don’t think I’m lucky to make you a lot of money!”

You have to get aggressive, even if only internally. Because otherwise, things don’t go well. You can’t create something like Beyoncé if you’re not willing to ROAR when you need to roar. You can’t create if you’re not going to say, “And where is my equity?” You have to be ferocious. You have to believe that all of it is yours. That you’re worthy of it.

I listen to a lot of Beyoncé, and a lot of Cardi B. I know I’m fucking worth it. I pump their words into my veins because the entire world, our entire society, is screaming the opposite.

Sabaa Tahir

The worth issue is a challenge you see a lot in immigrant communities. At least in my immigrant community, there’s the feeling of, “Oh, I don’t deserve it. And, if I get it, it’s because of the will of God,” which I’m not arguing with. But I have two older brothers. I feel like a lot of men walk in this world differently than women do. My brothers, and also my husband—who are men of color and have dealt with their own situations and issues of being marginalized—were like, “Why wouldn’t you get a lot of money for your book?” To them, it’s like, how could you not expect to get paid well for producing something that you tore out of the bedrock of your soul?

I’d pitched Ember as a series. I’d even laid out for the publisher what the other three books were going to be. But because we were asking for a lot of compensation, they said they could only do one book. I remember asking my agent, “Do you think they’ll buy the other ones?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. What do you think? Do you believe?”

I had to ask myself, “Do I believe in this story? Do I believe in what I’ve written? Do I believe in this thing I’ve poured my soul into for six years? Do I believe in the stories of these people who are going through the worst things possible and that deserves to be told in a way that’s accessible to young readers?” I had to dig deep. “Wait. I would not have spent six years on this thing if I didn’t believe. I absolutely believe.” And that was that.

Rosie Walsh, British documentary producer and author of six novels, including the international bestsellers The Love of My Life, The Man Who Didn’t Call (in the UK), and Ghosted (in the US).

Writing is a very difficult job. We spend a lot of time sitting in a room, not talking to people. Crucially, we don’t get feedback often. Even if you clean toilets for a living, people say thank you, or they give you a tip. Whereas as a writer, you could go months, if not years, without getting feedback from anyone. I think that’s quite crazymaking.

I’m like a car. I have to get serviced. I have a coach who I speak to who really helps. Just a couple of days ago, we came up with a new approach, specific hours I work each day because I’ve struggled as a new mum to make myself sit and write. And not just that, but we came up with affirmations, mostly to do with confidence and trusting myself. I think that’s a problem for most writers. Deep down, we don’t trust ourselves. For example, when you chop out a bit of text, I often paste that prose into a separate Word document. It’s as if I don’t trust myself to come up with another great phrase or metaphor. But I’m never going to go into that document again. So, I’m trying to use affirmations of trust because, most of the time, my default is to believe that I can’t.

In my eyes, our level of confidence comes down to what we’re prioritizing—our dreams and projects or what other people think of our dreams and projects. Despite how the smarty-pants Mean Girls immortalized me in the time capsule of our high school superlatives (bullshitters rule!), I survived. Was it painful? Eh, a little more than pushing out my son during natural childbirth. But their reasons for why I couldn’t succeed helped me zero in on why I would. Their smallness gave me a bigger WHY. Have you given any thought lately to your why? Now might be a good time to revisit what moves you to write in the first place.

Fact: You have no say in what people say. But you sure as hell have something to say about to whom, and what, you give your energy. Whenever you’re feeling blocked, keep turning to your studies; wisdom from your favorite writers will help ease your fear. And ask yourself the following questions:

“Where am I putting my focus?”

“What’s going on with my beliefs around my writing?”

“Do I still love this project?”

If your pages no longer please you, consider what it will take to get back to the love.

With each phase of writing and publishing my first book, I never forgot my why—being a champion for Mama Earth. My commitment to and faith in Her overrode anyone else’s doubt. Easy for you to say, you might think. You had that magical dream of six books. True. Seeing them together gave me a world of faith. I mean, who cares about Mean Girls when God’s giving you direct marching orders? But you have marching orders too. Just ask your desire where it comes from.

So, how can you rustle up your belief? Focus on your magic? Supercharge your self-confidence? I strengthened mine with Guru Singh’s spiritual B12 shots; meditating until my ass went numb; studying eco-warriors and marveling at their courage; reading so many books on craft I was left practically cross-eyed (plus, hiring an editing coach—more on that coming up); and rewriting chapters constantly. I shared my work with only those who felt safe. The more I kept at it, the surer my footing.

Once you’ve zeroed in on your why and reconnected with your excitement, your words will more easily flow. The bullying voices, past or present, will become as teeny as a tsetse fly. You won’t even hear them. Are you done yet? Because I’m busy.

By putting your fabulous focus on yourself and your dreams, countless others will be inspired by the confidence and preparation it took for you to believe in yourself and your writing.

5

Scared Much?

Silencing the Bullies, Inner and Outer