Writers are exceptionally good at telling stories, and not all of them end up in our books.
The Stories Writers Tell Themselves is a limited audio series by novelist Katherine Collette about the stories writers make up about rejection, comparison, success, failure and what everything means, and what happens when we start to see those stories a little differently.
Ten stories, plus a bonus walking meditation for writers. Listen from the beginning or start with the story that sounds most like yours.
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
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Episode 2 - What if everyone hates my work?
Writers spend a lot of time making up stories and not all of them end up in our books.
The Stories Writers Tell Themselves is a free limited audio series about the stories writers make up about rejection, comparison, success, failure and what everything means, and what happens when we start to see those stories a little differently.
Start with the story that sounds most like yours, or begin at Episode 1.
I'm Katherine Collette, a novelist. I write books for children and adults.
I also help other writers write their books.
For more:
Join the waitlist to be the first to hear about ways to work with me when I open them up again
Hi, I'm Catherine Collette and this is the stories writers tell themselves series. One of the strange things about writing is that for a long time you can do it almost entirely in private and then eventually if you want to be read, it has to change. Writing something is one thing, letting someone else read it is another. And that is when this particular story tends to show up. The story is, what if everyone hates my work? Maybe for you it sounds like, what if they think it's terrible? What if they don't get it? What if someone I know reads it? Or worse, what if nobody reads it at all? This isn't only a story that shows up when you're starting out. You can have published several books and still think, what if this one isn't that good? What if my editor doesn't like it? What if readers liked what I did before but they don't like this? What if I've somehow forgotten how to write? The circumstances and the specifics change, but the underlying problem is much the same. I'm about to let people see something I've made and I can't control what they think about it. Because sharing your work feels risky. And that's because to some extent it is. Writing is personal, even when you're writing fiction. I think, especially when you're writing fiction, you are revealing something about how you think, what you find funny, what you notice, what you care about. There's a strange tension here because writers want to write, but we also want to be read. We actually want someone else to pick up the thing we've made and connect with it. That's kind of the point. But getting what you want means allowing someone else to have an opinion about it. At some point, the writing has to go from being a document on your computer to something you hand to another person, which creates a fairly obvious problem. They might not like it. I remember the first couple of times as an adult, I shared my writing with other people incredibly clearly. The first was with a colleague at work. I gave her a short story I'd written, and she was nice enough about it. She made a few polite comments, nothing terrible happened. So then a few months later, I asked her if she'd read something else, and she told me quite bluntly, she didn't want to read anything else I wrote, which was embarrassing. I still remember it. If I'm honest, I don't like her now. The second time was at a writing workshop. This was so early on in my writing life. At that point, I was the kind of person who sometimes found it difficult just to speak in a workshop. So sharing something I'd actually written felt like torture because so much seemed to hang on it. Was I any good? Could I actually write? Was there any possibility of this going somewhere? Or had I just invented an elaborate new way to humiliate myself in public? The thing that made it particularly hard back then was that, and I say this objectively, my writing wasn't that good. Not yet. I can see that now, but this is the catch. You have to let other people see your work in order to get better. At some point, you need feedback. You need readers. Eventually, you need agents or publishers or editors or actual members of the general public. You cannot develop entirely in private. Strangely, this doesn't completely go away once you've been published. I've published multiple books now. I've had editors read my work many times. I've had reviews and readers and launches and all of it, and I still have to send someone the first version of a new book. I still have that moment where someone who knows what they're doing is going to open the document and find out what I've done. Every new book gives people another opportunity to have an opinion. Maybe you've written something different from your previous work, maybe you've taken a bigger risk. Maybe the last book did particularly well, and now you're wondering whether this one can live up to it, or maybe the last one didn't do what you'd hoped. And now this book seems to be carrying the weight of proving you can still do it. Being published doesn't solve the problem of being seen. In some ways, it just changes who's looking. Because being read means being seen, not literally, but your writing reveals you in ways that you don't necessarily expect. There is something of you in the work, even when you're writing fiction. And so when someone judges the work, it can feel surprisingly close to them judging you. And that can change what you write. One response to this fear is to try to remove the risk before anyone even gets the chance to judge you. So you write something safer. You don't go quite as far as what you might have. You imagine your mother reading it, or your boss, or your high school English teacher, or the person you most desperately don't want to think you're weird. And without really meaning to, you start writing for them. You start editing yourself before you've even properly made the thing. Here's a very low-stakes example. I made this meme once. It was of Lisa Simpson standing at a coffee machine filling up her cup. The idea of it was sort of what fills your cup. I wrote something essentially saying that what filled my cup was hearing that another author that I really admired did an event and hardly anyone showed up. Now to be clear, this wasn't really Schadenfreud saying that correctly. I didn't want their event to go badly. It was not that at all. It was more that hearing it had gone badly made me feel strangely better about all the times things hadn't gone perfectly for me, which is still not an enormously flattering thing to admit. And that's why I nearly didn't post it. Not because it wasn't true, but because it was. And I thought, God, this makes me look like such a small person. But I did post it. And later that week another writer came up to me at an event and said, Oh my god, that is me. I feel exactly the same way. And I remember thinking, of course. The thing I was slightly ashamed to admit was the exact thing someone else recognized themselves in. And I think there's something in that. Sometimes the parts of ourselves we're most tempted to edit out are the parts that make someone else think, oh good, it's not just me. I mean, not always. You don't have to be a soul every time you write something, but writing that connects usually has something alive in it, something particular that feels true. And trying to remove every possibility of judgment can also remove some of that. So I don't think the answer to what if everyone hates my work is they won't. Because some people will. Some people might misunderstand it or think it's boring or actively dislike it. And if you've already published books, you know this. You've probably had lovely reviews and you've had ones that cut you to your core. While these might have hurt, you also survived them. And so yes, you may occasionally ask someone to read something and discover they would prefer never to read anything you've ever written again. And you will survive that too. So perhaps the more useful question is not what if everyone hates it? It's what would I write if I wasn't trying to control everyone's response to it? Because eventually, if you want readers, you do have to accept the strange bargain involved. You make something that matters to you, you make it as good as you can, and then you let other people have their own response to it. That's the deal. The goal isn't to stop caring what people think, it's to care enough about the writing that you are willing to let them think it. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please do recommend it to a friend. And if you didn't enjoy it, just recommend it to an enemy. Happy writing!
