On comparing yourself to others

As a quick update: I did a word count recently and I’m 35k or so words into book 2. That’s one whole third! I hope. One whole third of the first draft. If I keep up the 1k a day 5 days a week I should be done in 14 weeks, or five months. Not bad. On top of that, I finished a short story.

Today I want to talk about a major source of discouragement. Comparison. I told a student recently, well, I quoted, that “comparison is the thief of joy.” Wish I came up with that, oh well, I’ll never be as poignant as Theodore Roosevelt.

Or be a president for that matter.

The student in question is one of my favourites. She’s a budding creative writer and was lamenting that she did not get enough readers on her Wattpad, where she specialises in FIFA fan fiction. Didn’t even know that was a thing till I met her, but hey, the internet is a glorious place.

She had 14 000 reads on one of her stories.

She’s 13.

I read a comment on one of her stories that went something like, “Hi, my 10-year-old son is a huge fan of all your stories. Could you please do one with [some dude] and Messi? Thank you.”

She gets requests. She’s still not happy.

I can’t even begin to articulate how mind-blowing it would be to be 13 and have 14k reads on a story. In fairness, she also has to deal with being a teenager, which I don’t envy her for, but I still had to convince her to stop comparing herself. It’s a truism, but there’s always someone better and there’s always someone worse.

For a while I couldn’t read or watch certain books and shows because they’d make me jealous.

I’m not the only one in this regard, having spoken to other people that do creative work.

Not only do I fail to enjoy what are, by definition, fantastic works of fiction, but I also fail to learn from them- which would be the more productive use of my mental energy. Over comparing isn’t a new phenomenon, but the media of our times has intensified it.

At a certain time in history, you might have had a shelf full of books by the so-called greats such as, If you’re English, the Homers and Shakespeares and Dickens. A handful of ‘masters’ to try to measure up to. Sure its a tall order, but I’d rather have a handful of teachers on a high shelf than what happens nowadays.

These days we’re surrounded by pedestals and giants. Not only that, we live in a culture that celebrates the giants. We aren’t just bombarded with the works of great creators, through Netflix and Ebooks and pirated entertainment on demand, we’re bombarded with their private lives and the behind the scenes, through the blogs of writers or Medium articles.

In a way its a magnificent time to be alive. Truly.

Unless you’re a budding creator. Whether its Instagram lifestyles, stories of insane body transformations, or entrepreneurs that make it big, we are surrounded by the narratives of the so-called great, and let’s face it, at least part ways lucky breakouts successes.

It can be discouraging. Sometimes its inspiring too, don’t get me wrong, but I wanted to talk about the flip side of that. There’s evidence that social media is utterly toxic. I’m hypothesising its the constant comparing that’s stealing the joy out of our lives.

I’d rather a monk’s cell with a handful of books and time to write than this cornucopia of original, often stunning work.

So what do we do with all this? Learning would be ideal. If possible, to take all this work and treat it like a resource, not a condemnation. I once wrote a short story about a kid who learns about his father through the Steam video game library he leaves behind for him, and one of the comments left by a judge in the competition I entered was that she had seen the same thing in an episode of Black Mirror. I’ve barely seen the show, so I hadn’t copied the thing, but that dismissal because she assumed I copied it, or maybe that it wasn’t original enough, that stung a bad one for a while.

But if instead of all this comparing, instead of treating the whole world of media as one global village we’re all a part of, what if instead we just look at it like islands. It’s not about how well your story does among the annals of every competition and award, but how it’s received by whoever reads it- no matter how limited a number that is. Your niche, your tribe, not the whole world. The internet is a network that connects readers to you. Your FIFA fan fiction lovers, your trashy erotica connoisseurs, all of them led by the hand to the one island they love.

We’ll never consume all the entertainment that’s out there right now. Every day we pass by the series and the stories that we would probably become insane fans of should we be exposed to them.

But its too much. So there is no universal audience that’s awaiting our next piece of creative work. There are the readers and the viewers who might not have seen that episode of Black Mirror, or who might be touched by our particular style even if there might be something ‘better’ out there for them. The concept of the hipster is of a person who's always claiming that the mainstream version of a story is not the best representation of that genre. But hipsters are rare.

I’m trying to stop comparing myself to all these people. All the giants. It’s not productive. Because with that student of mine, I know as a teacher that my goal is to keep them writing. To encourage them. Because that’s how we get better in the end, and any force that pressures us to give up or slow down is an unconstructive one that ought to be overcome.

So sometimes I imagine that monk’s cell with that handful of books and ignore the noise. It’s fun. Whatever your endeavour, I encourage you to try it sometimes. This was a long post, and hopefully one that made some sense, because it is long and a bit of a ramble, but by the end of it I’ve convinced myself as well to compare less and maybe that’s a good thing.

On that note, tribesperson, here’s part three of HTWACN :

Chapter 3: We built this city

Upstairs we emerge back into the cacophony of horning cars and laughing drunkards. A bottle crashes somewhere up ahead, a busker playing Wonderwall somewhere behind us. The streets buzz with the pent-up frustration of office workers at the end of their tether, teenagers imitating degenerates and wild eyed primary school teachers seeking sexual catharsis.

Fransceca walks ever in front of me. I try to find my way to her side but the pavements narrow with stumbling fools, and I am always the one relegated to the back. No matter. As the beast within begins to growl I decide to narrate, to plan my novel after my killer first line whilst we walk.

Our protagonist, the vampire, was waiting for her for 23 minutes even though she was a werewolf, but where was he waiting? Outside her front door, of course, a slave to her desires. Perhaps she is his sister? No, that should be a revelation saved for later, a potential conflict, something that is implied and dangled in front of the reader, peaking their disgust and curiosity, only to find it is a terrible rumour planted by her jealous lover, lest the vampire compete and ride the wolf. It will do, it well do. I consider querying marsupial press tonight with my first chapter and proposition.

Marsupial press is Hong Kong’s foremost independent publisher. It is run and owned by a once employee of HSBS bank, of ambiguous former occupation so that when asked at parties he would open his mouth to answer the question of what he did, close it again, sigh, and self-effacingly say, “I’m in finance.” But whether that meant he was an investment banker or a copy-editor has, is and always likely will be completely ambiguous. Regardless he is no longer in finance, but in publishing, where he has demonstrated a gift for publishing two things with financial success: poetry, and erotic novellas. He is my route towards being a commercially successful novelist. I have already sold him three poetry collections, each on a different element; fire, earth, water, he currently and anxiously awaits ‘air’, but I have had poets block for months now and no amount of thesaurus has provoked further inspiration.

Whilst I narrated, planning the erotic twists of my novella, we made our way up the paved hill, past the stuttering road lights and into the throng that congeals at the bottom of Lan Kwai Fong. The club 7/11 goers, the taxi-cab waiters, the tourists who are too stunned to continue. When we reach the bottom Franscesca hesitates, then retrieves a folded piece of paper from her purse. She presses is it into my palms, her lips coming to my ears as her whisper tickles my lobes. “Read it after I leave, Bob, not before. Read it when you are home. Promise me, only then.”

I look at her and say, “I promise Francesca. When I am home.”

“And not a moment sooner.”

“Not a moment sooner.”

Our eyes linger but she turns away first. “Onwards.” I mutter, as I thrust the note into my pants. She climbs up the slope of Lan Kwai, flanked on either side by a riot of bars and nightclubs, each with their bouncers and touts calling out drink deals and party-proposals, beckoning women to enter, or outright grabbing their arms till they realize they have overstepped, as they attempt to drag passers-by into their dens of iniquity and salvation. The noise is overwhelming. The deep beating of the bass lines of a dozen clubs blasting on either side, the occasional lyrics of an orphaned pop song cutting through the night like a scream. People laugh and shout and stand in inconvenient circles on the streets so that we must navigate with dexterity in order to make it further up, till we crest the slope and find ourselves in front of Club 97, an ancient dive referencing the date when Hong Kong was handed back to China, an expatriate scum bucket filled with dark corners and blatant prostitutes. The sort of place I would never imagine Fransceca entering. She is a creature of elegance with dark edges, a stiletto in a velvet sheath, not a desperate drunkard looking for a tumble.

The entrance, open air to the street, dark as a cave reflect the beady eyes of the desperate and horny, flaming Lamborghinis casting lurid shadows and enough illumination to make out the bright white teeth and paunchy bellies of props who have been here since 3 pm. But what is in the note? My hand finds it’s edges, squeeze till it crumples slightly. A confession? A lewd proposal? It would be something she cannot say out loud in my presence. Something wonderful or awful or a bit of both. As she turns away I slip the paper from my jeans and towards my face. With one finger I unfold it and catch a word, halfway down: “Inheritance.” Before she turns towards me and I palm the note.

We enter the den of iniquity and sorrow. “Now where to Franscesca?” I imagine the bar, where the bartender might share a secret, a connection that Francesca has unfortunately uncovered- a terrible revelation. Or perhaps to one of the hidden corners, where the lonely smudge bodied against one another, sometimes professionally. The dance floor even, all of this a ruse, all of this one long story so Fransceca can tell me to shut up and dance with me. I lean towards the dance floor as she takes my hand. My heart throbs at her cool touch, the soft give of her palms, silk against my rough, hairy wrists, which threaten to sprout more hairs at any moment. She drags me and I go willingly, past the bar, towards the dance floor. Perhaps she is about to make her terrible mistake now. Perhaps I am her terrible mistake.

But what then of those marks on her lips and chin, those red, dare I say it, bloody marks. Before we reach the dance floor she veers off to the left, towards a dark black door we with two figures emblazoned on its surface. She take me towards the unisex bathroom and I baulk. This is not the sultry filth I expected. But she turns to me and half-yells, “Don’t worry Bob, this happens all the time. Come inside with me.” She pushes open the door and before I can resist, drags me through with her extra-natural strength. We stand awkwardly, with so little room to manoeuvre, the urinal pressed against my buttocks, what sink against hers, our groins nearly touching as she points to the closed door of the toilet stall.

“What have I done,” she mutters again to herself. Then she takes her nail and presses it to the key, which has an ‘occupied’ sign and turns the lock, bypassing the security of the stall, before opening it to reveal a terrible sight. Her mistake is obvious, but the cause is unknown. A story demanding a prologue, a secret that needs be spoken. But first I take out my notebook, as I am inspired, and jot down the seeds of greatness.