4 Character Traits that Will Derail Your Writing Career

Could your character traits really determine how well you succeed as a writer?

According to recent research, they could. After following thousands of people over a period of decades, economist and researcher James Heckman and colleagues found that perseverance, good study habits, and the ability to collaborate were more important than raw intelligence for future career success.

But then there’s the other side of the coin—those character traits that can actually derail your progress. We all have them inside us to some degree, so what matters is how well we manage them.

Character Traits: An Old Legend

It’s like the old Cherokee legend says:

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy. 

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

“The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.” 

Below you’ll find four character flaws or “wolves” that can spoil your writing career, and how you can feed their opposites to increase your chances of success.

Character Traits 1. Writers with narcissistic tendencies can’t succeed alone.

Narcissism is an excess of interest in oneself. It’s an easy trait for writers to fall into, since writers do so much of their work in isolation.

Poet Sylvia Plath famously said:

“I think writers are the most narcissistic people. Well, I mustn’t say this, I like many of them, a great many of my friends are writers.”

“There is a selfishness of the artistic temperament,” agrees poet Janette Ayachi, “one needs space to write, we are mostly turned inwards to ‘radio me’, we litter our speech with the pronoun ‘I’ and deal with a lot of self-preoccupation in order to find the words, and a way of words, that we call upon for delivery.”

There’s no doubt that writing takes a good amount of inward focus, but if it goes too far, you could find yourself traveling the journey alone, and every writer needs a community, not only for support, but for connections, networking, and exposure.

Signs this wolf is growing too big:

• Your social media profiles are filled only with your own things, particularly if much of it is personal ramblings.
• At writer’s conferences, you find yourself boasting of your accomplishments in most every interaction.
• When your work fails to find success, you tend to blame others and characterize them as fools or idiots.
• You insist you are significantly different from others, and that excuses any negative traits or behaviors.
• You have become so involved in your writing life that any other pursuits or events in life seem unimportant.

How to feed the other wolf, “empathy.”

The opposite of narcissism is empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. To grow this trait and balance out any narcissism you may be experiencing, try these tips:

• Make a point to regularly feature other people and their accomplishments on social media and anywhere else you may be able to.
• When conversing with other people, train yourself to ask questions. Be interested in them and make it a point to find out more about them. Allow your desire to promote yourself to fade into the background.
• Regularly get away from your writing into other pursuits in life. Get back into your hobbies, or join your friends more often. Keep writing in perspective.
• Remember how important it is to build relationships. This should be a key part of your writing tasks. Doing so will help take you away from narcissistic leanings.

2. Pessimistic writers get discouraged too quickly.

Pessimism is the tendency to believe that the worst will happen, or to feel a lack of hope for the future. Since writers often have to work for years before gaining any traction in the market, hope is a requirement! But we can easily get caught up into pessimistic “spells,” particularly after receiving a string or rejections or experiencing a slump in sales.

Suddenly you may find yourself wondering, “Why bother? It’s never going to get any better. The market is flooded with books, and it’s getting harder every day to get noticed.” It may all start to see useless.

Signs this wolf is growing too big:

• You’ve grown apathetic toward your own work.
• You’re writing less often than you used to, or you’ve stopped marketing altogether.
• You can usually feel this one—your level of motivation drops and you just don’t care as much as you used to.

How to feed the other wolf, “optimism.”

The opposite of pessimism is optimism, and you need this trait if you’re going to keep going, and keep trying. Fortunately, this isn’t a hard wolf to feed.

• Remind yourself to live in the present. We tend to get pessimistic when we start making predictions about the future (“I’m never going to make it”), so focus only on the present day and what you want to make of it.
• Use your left brain. Studies show that right-brain (more creative) activity is also more associated with pessimism than left-brain (more analytical) activity. In one study, participants with more left-brain activity who watched funny movies had a far more optimistic response than those with more right-side brain activity. So when you find yourself feeling pessimistic, the key may be as simple as switching from your right brain to your left brain. Get busy on some editing, submitting, or organizing, and see if your mood doesn’t improve.
• Challenge yourself to see the silver lining. What’s good about the situation? Whenever you’re feeling pessimistic, stop yourself and ask, “What’s the positive side of this?” Don’t quit until you find one!
• Surround yourself with optimistic, positive people.
• Avoid anything that makes you feel pessimistic (including the news!).
• Keep a daily gratitude journal.

Character Traits 3. Fearful writers struggle to stay up with the times.

Just when you think you’ve started to gain some ground on your writing career, things change. Amazon snatches away some of those legitimate reviews you worked so hard for. One social media platform dies while ten others pop up. Audio books start gaining ground. Website design advances.

We’re all regularly taken off guard by how quickly things change in our world today. Technology is moving at a breakneck pace, and writers are just as affected as anyone else. That means we often feel off balance, and like we’ll never be able to keep up.

If you’re afraid of change, you’re not alone. According to recent research, most of us are. In one experiment, scientists had one group of people view a painting they were told was completed in 1905, and another viewed the same painting but was told it was completed in 2005.

Guess which painting most people thought was more aesthetically pleasing? You got it—the older one. Researchers concluded that we like things that have been around a while because we don’t like change.

Change also means uncertainty, and most of us fear the unknown. Studies show that our brains view uncertainty as an error that needs to be fixed, so it’s no wonder we’re uncomfortable with it. But to succeed in today’s writing industry, we have to get better at dealing with it.

Signs this wolf is growing too big:

• You’ve grown a bit complacent. You’re too comfortable in your comfort zone. It’s been more than a year since you’ve done anything that scares you.
• Your website, marketing tactics, and writing plugs along unchanged.
• You may find that you feel a little bored.

How to feed the other wolf, “curiosity.”

Usually the opposite of fear is described as “courage,” but to bring your courage forward, you must first cultivate your curiosity. The more you’re curious about something—how you might update your website, for example—the more interested you are going to be in it, and the more likely you are to start researching what it would take.

As you seek to satisfy your curiosity, you’ll learn more about the change you’re facing, and the more you learn, the less frightening it will seem.

All this requires is a simple shift in mindset. Usually we get worried about change because we fear our ability to deal with it. Set those fears aside and allow yourself to simply be curious. How might this change benefit you? How might you take advantage of it? What are other writers doing with it?

Other tips that may help:

• Remember the old cliché that writing is a journey, not a destination, and it’s bound to continue to change. See yourself as an ever-evolving writer.
• Embrace being a student—every time you face a change, you face the task of going back and starting over. You’ll have to learn something new. That can be tough to do after you’ve gained a certain amount of experience. Allow yourself to be a newbie again. You may find that it’s fun!
• Let go of trying to be perfect. It’s impossible anyway. Just do the best you can, and keep learning.

4. Entitled writers find it difficult to put in the hard work.

You may think, “I don’t feel entitled!” But ask yourself: How quickly did you expect success?

Did you think that after one book, you would be able to quit your job and write full-time? That your first attempt would be a bestseller? Did you experience severe disappointment when these things didn’t happen?

Entitlement is the feeling that you “deserve” or have a right to something. It makes sense that writers might feel this from time to time. It’s darn hard work writing a book. It takes a lot of time and during creation, presents few if any outside rewards. After putting in all the hard work and emotional effort, you may think you deserve to get something back.

When you work, you get a paycheck, but when you write a book, there’s no guarantee you’ll receive any outside rewards at all. We can find ourselves rather surprised when it happens. “But I got an editor. I spent years on this book. I worked so hard!”

The problem with this wolf is that it can lead to discouragement, and may eventually kill your motivation for writing completely.

“Entitlement is dangerous” says writer Paul Jun at Motivated Mastery, “because it’s a safe place to hide and it gets you nowhere; at best it is merely self-serving, and at worst it trends toward narcissism. You can hold up an image of yourself and scream, This is as perfect as it can be. I have worked so hard on this. Why is no one buying it?”

Signs this wolf is growing too big:

• You feel a huge disappointment in how your writing career has turned out.
• You feel abused, like a victim. It seems other writers experienced success more easily than you.
• You may feel the market “owes” you after all the effort you’ve put in.
• You feel deflated and unimportant.

How to feed the other wolf, “barred.”

The opposite of entitled is “barred” or “ineligible.” Imagine just for a moment that you’re barred from entering the realm of successful writers. You’re not allowed, for whatever reason. Membership requires a combination of hard work, persistence, and good luck. Realize how difficult this task is that you’ve taken on—the near impossibility of it. Then ask yourself if you still want to try.

If you do, then see this journey as the uphill battle it is. Success in writing is definitely possible, but it helps to remind yourself that it’s not an easy thing to accomplish, and that it’s likely to require more of your courage, persistence, energy, and will than most anything else you might tackle in life.

Return to humility, and remind yourself that you’re in this for the long haul. You have time to make your dreams come true. It all doesn’t have to happen right now.

“Always remember that the world doesn’t owe you anything,” says writer Lianne Choo. “Banish that sense of entitlement today and you will find that you will accomplish so much more, plus it’ll last for way longer and feel so much better.”

Have have these character flaws slowed you down?

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Sources

Ayachi, J. (2015, October 15). Writers and Narcissism • Poetry School. Retrieved from https://poetryschool.com/essays/writers-and-narcissism/

Choo, L. (2015, May 27). 9 Real Ways to Get Rid of That Sense of Entitlement. Retrieved from https://www.lovepanky.com/my-life/better-life/real-ways-to-get-rid-of-that-sense-of-entitlement

Eidelman, S. (2010). Longer is better. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 993-998. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2010.07.008

Flam, F. (2017, August 7). If you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich? Retrieved from https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/personality-iq-success-wealth-factors-determining-prospects-intelligence-careers-james-heckman-a7880376.html

Jun, P. (2016, July 1). How to Get Over Your Own Sense of Entitlement – Motivated Mastery. Retrieved from http://motivatedmastery.com/get-sense-entitlement/

Steinhilber, B. (2017, August 24). How to be an optimist, when you always see the negative. Retrieved from https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health/how-train-your-brain-be-more-optimistic-ncna795231

Tomarken, A. J., Davidson, R. J., & Henriques, J. B. (1990). Resting frontal brain asymmetry predicts affective responses to films. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(4), 791-801. doi:10.1037//0022-3514.59.4.791