Feeling like a big, fat fraud by D.A Lascelles

A few years ago, while I was in the middle of writing up my MPhil thesis for university and my funding ran out, I answered an ad in a newspaper from a local college looking for what they called ‘Visiting Lecturers’ for adult education. I was not expecting to get this job and yet, a short while after answering the ad and being invited to interview, I found myself standing in front of a class of students who were expecting me to teach them. It was at this point that it hit me: I’m not a qualified teacher, I know nothing at all about how to do this stuff! In hindsight, I should probably have drawn that conclusion earlier but, as it was, it was good that I didn’t.

I somehow managed to make it through that lesson. A combination of a good level of academic knowledge in my subject, experience of doing presentations in seminars while doing my degree and a certain amount of adrenaline fuelled tap dancing on the edge of the catastrophe curve saw me through. I made a reasonable part time living as a Visiting Lecturer for a while after that but always with this innate fear that someone was going to find me out.

Then, I got poached by a Teaching Supply Agency. I told them I did not have a teaching qualification but they seemed to think it was ok. I told them I had no experience teaching children but again they seemed unperturbed. I was soon standing in front of another scary class, this one of 14 year olds and the old fear was there – you are not a real teacher, they’ll know this and tear you apart. Again, a hastily cobbled together set of pedagogy borne out of desperation saved me from total collapse and discovery as a fraud. I managed to survive, day to day, for almost 2 years. Finally, I decided I couldn’t continue in this vein. Fate had decided I was going to be a teacher so I decided to follow fate and get myself a qualification.

So I did. I got my PGCE and found myself in front of another class, this time with my knowledge and experience honed by the lecturers and mentors on the course.

And I still felt like a fraud. I still felt as if I had no right to be there.

So, what has this to do with being a writer? Well, I am getting the same feelings here too. I’ve been writing for years, too many to count. My first ‘novel’ was written as a child in school and was (at the time) the greatest piece of literature ever written (it wasn’t, it really wasn’t...). I wrote it for fun and as a way of amusing some of my friends. I kept writing all through school, all through college and university and while working. My writing skills were applied to work I did (writing reports, journal articles and especially my thesis) and I never really thought about the possibility of publication. This is something I do for fun, why would anyone pay me for it? Even when I did think about possibly being published (when I made the first few forays into submitting short stories to magazines and anthologies) I never really felt like a real writer. Any minute I was expecting someone to turn to me and say: ‘This is useless, you aren’t a real writer. Go away and stop bothering us with this crap!’ It never happened but I was always afraid that would. In the back of my mind there was this ideal state, this nirvana where I would get published and suddenly I would be a real writer. Like Pinocchio, I was aiming (I thought) for the impossible. Once this state was achieved, once I got rid of the stigma of being unpublished, I would feel different – I would have opinions people would be interested in, access to some form of secret font of knowledge and the confident security that comes with knowing that you are right.

Earlier this year I got two e-mails which told me that I was to be published. I was now a real writer. And I do have access to a secret font of knowledge but it is not one that gives confidence and security. Like the me that, newly qualified, stood in front of a class and felt the same uncertainty I had felt when I was unqualified, I am sitting here as a newly published writer and thinking: Why the hell did I get published? What makes my work any different from the thousands of rejected stories that land on slush piles on a thousand publisher desks all over the world?

On that day, in front of that class, I did come to an epiphany of sorts. I realised that teachers felt like that all the time. All the teachers you have ever met, who have ever taught you, have stood there and felt like a fraud and yet somehow managed to pull themselves together and put on the show of being a ‘real teacher’. Writers are the same. I don’t think you ever lose that uncertainty no matter how many times you are published, you never lose that feeling that what you write has no value. The trick is pull yourself together and put on the front that you do know what you are talking about and hope like hell that the buying public don’t see through it.