Writers' imposter syndrome

I'm no longer a new writer, I think I mostly come under the 'emerging' heading. I've had a fair few successes, I'm doing ok. I've even taken over running the local writing group. Yet I still sometimes end up at writers' gatherings feeling thick, left out, and like I shouldn't really be there.

Some of this comes from not knowing the jargon. Surrounded by people with a BA in Eng Lit, or an MA in Creative Writing, they say things like 'of course that's a metaphor for...' and my mind swings back to the pre-GCSE English class where we learnt that a simile is where you're saying it's similar to and metaphors are the other one. By which time I've missed the rest of the sentence anyway. Or they use some terminology I'm completely unfamiliar with, and since everyone else is nodding and looking serious, I don't like to interrupt matters by asking what the blazes they're on about. For the most part, I don't need to know the technical terms - there are lots of bits of grammar I don't know the rules for, let alone the names, but years of reading other people's books, and absorbing the rhythm and typical ways of phrasing things means I can use them in context.

Sometimes they've seen themes in my work that aren't there. I get suggestions to mine this a bit more, or go further with my exploration of that. It was just a story about a teapot, I want to say. I am not as deep and multi-layered as you think I am. The teapot is not symbolic, it's certainly not a metaphor for whatever it is you just said that I missed while I was remembering what metaphor means, and I don't want her to shatter it at the end. It's a teapot, it's for making tea in. She'd only have to sweep it up afterwards.

At any given gathering of writers, I can guarantee that someone will mention a book and at least one other person will have read it. Occasionally I'll have heard of (but not read) it, often I haven't even heard of the author and I marvel at this literary synchronicity that means that out of all the millions of books available in English, these two people in the same room have read the same one in the last few weeks. Then I wonder how I come across - do they all think I don't read? I mention Ben Aaronovitch or Reginald Hill and they look blank. Terry Pratchett at least is a recognisable name even if they know nothing about his books. I give up, stay quiet, consider only going to genre-based gatherings.

On Kit de Waal's Radio 4 programme about working class writers last year, someone said working class stories are rock n roll to the literary novel's classical music. I don't think it's purely class-based snobbery though, it's genre as well (look at the lack of genre novels winning mainstream prizes). Most of the fiction I read is SF, crime or a mixture of the two. I read recently that a writer needs to keep up with the literary world. Listen to Front Row, the advice went. Read the books pages. Now The Guardian has good SF reviews, I often add things to my To Read list from there, but whenever I've inadvertently caught bits of Front Row (Radio 4 arts review programme) it's always struck me as people being pretentious about books I don't want to read, and events in London. The musical analogy caught up with me though and I had a (minor) revelation.

I like listening to music and I know a fair bit about it. The stuff I like, that is. Get me on glam metal, NWOBHM, certain strands of British indie, and I can bore for Britain. However, I neither know nor care what's on Radio 3 or Radio 1, who's on the proms this year or who's just won a Brit award. Why should I, when the radio station I'm most likely to listen to is La Grosse Radio Metal? If I want to listen to old music it'll be Benny Goodman not Beethoven. I don't recognise anything I hear emanating from the flat of my opera-singer neighbour, but I can guarantee he doesn't recognise my Bon Jovi tapes either. It doesn't mean I'm less intelligent than an opera buff, just that we have different tastes.

Note that different doesn't mean one is better than the other. Nobody has any business saying that someone 'should' have read any book outside their favoured genre, and I need to remember that just because everyone else around the table has read Muriel Spark or Ian Rankin there's no need for me to do so. I'm not going to tell people who don't like SF that they should read Tad Williams, just like I'm not going to tell people who like hip hop that they should listen to Black Sabbath. That doesn't stop me from wearing my Sabbath hoodie, and while I'm not about to buy a Tad Williams T-shirt I may bolster myself at writer's gatherings by cultivating the secure separateness of the metaller in a crowd of Radio 1 listeners.