Episode 6 - Everyone else is doing better than me Artwork

The Stories Writers Tell Themselves

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.

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The Stories Writers Tell Themselves

Episode 6 - Everyone else is doing better than me

August 13, 2026 • Katherine • Episode 6

0:00 | 5:01

Episode 6 - Everyone else is doing better than me

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
Follow me on Instagram @katherinecollettewriter
Download my popular Story Threads resource
Check out my latest book (it's for kids) The Girl Who Cried Bird

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi, I'm Catherine Collard. Welcome back to the stories writers tell themselves. The story in this lesson is everyone else is doing better than me. Maybe you open Instagram and someone has announced a book deal. Someone else has won a prize. Someone's book is suddenly everywhere. Maybe it's not even someone famous. Often I think those people are easier. It's someone you know, someone you started writing around the same time as, whose career once looked roughly like yours, and suddenly something happens for them and you are pleased for them. You are. But also, something else happens. Their good news somehow becomes information about you. They are moving forward, you are standing still. They're doing well, you're not. This is the everyone else is doing better than me story. I think comparison is almost impossible to avoid as a writer. Publishing gives you an extraordinary amount of information about other people's careers. You see announcements and reviews and festival invitations and books in shop windows, and social media has made it possible to receive all of this information while you are sitting at home trying to fix the opening chapters of your book again. Which can be a difficult contrast. I've started to think comparison itself is not necessarily the problem because comparison can actually give you useful information. The difficulty is working out what information it's giving you. Sometimes it shows you what you want. There have definitely been times when I've seen something happen for another writer and had a reaction that was slightly more intense than I would have preferred. And my first instinct has been to judge myself for it. Why can't I just be happy for them? Why am I jealous? Why am I apparently such a small and terrible person? But there is another way to look at that reaction. Another writer's success can bring something you want into very sharp focus. You can be genuinely pleased for someone and at the exact same time feel the force of your own disappointment that it hasn't happened for you. I don't think the second feeling cancels out the first. And rather than immediately deciding it makes you jealous or ungenerous, maybe it's worth noticing what it's telling you, which is the fact that you want that thing too. I actually think that's useful to know. It doesn't mean you're entitled to have it. It doesn't even mean you should pursue it. But another person's success can show you something about your own ambition that you might not have seen before. I also think our reaction to other people's success can tell us something about where we are. This is something I've noticed in myself. There are times when I can hear another writer has a huge deal, won something sold a squillion books, whatever it is, and I feel super meaningfully happy for them. And then there are other times when almost the exact same news really gets to me. The difference isn't necessarily what's happened to them, it's usually what's going on with me. If I'm tired or disappointed or I've been working hard for a long time without much coming back, it just hits differently. Their good news isn't any different. What's different is my capacity to hear it. And I think that's an important distinction because sometimes the answer to comparison isn't to analyze your career harder. Maybe you don't need to work out what they're doing that you're not doing. You don't need a better strategy. Maybe you're just tired. And then there's a third kind of information that comparison can give you. Sometimes somebody else's success expands your idea of what is possible. Interestingly, I think these are often the people who are hardest to compare yourself with. Someone roughly your age, writing similar books, who started around the same time you did. When someone feels close enough to be comparable, their success can sting. But closeness actually works both ways. If someone not entirely unlike you has done the thing you want to do, their success isn't only something you can measure yourself against, it can also make the possibility more real. Not inevitable or guaranteed, but possible. And that's a very different slant. The fact of them doing it means you can too. Of course, some things in publishing are limited, right? There is one winner of a prize. Publishers have finite lists. I'm not suggesting we all stand in a circle and declare that there's an infinite supply of book deals. But most of the time, someone else's good news hasn't actually changed your prospects. It's changed how you feel about your prospects. And those are not the same thing. So I don't think the goal is to stop comparing yourself. Good luck with that. Comparison isn't always useful. Sometimes it just makes you feel terrible. And sometimes the best thing you can do is close Instagram and get on with your day. Go touch some grass. But when someone else's success really gets under your skin, I don't think you necessarily need to judge yourself for that reaction either. It might just be showing you what you want. It might be expanding your idea of what is possible. Or it might just be that you are tired and disappointed and somebody else's good news has landed on top of that. I think knowing the difference between these things matters because another writer's career can give you information, but it cannot tell you what's going to happen in yours. Their success isn't a prediction about you or your future, and it isn't evidence you are doing badly. Other people's success can just be information about what you want. It doesn't have to be information about how you're doing. Thanks for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please recommend it to a friend. And if you didn't, just recommend it to your enemy. Happy writing.