Poet Voice- Episode 5- Imposter Syndrome

In this episode, I discuss imposter syndrome and how it can impact our writing, suggest navigating imposter syndrome by treating it as a friend, and provide practical tips for tackling writer’s block, such as bribing yourself to write! I then talk a little about George Saunders’ book on Russian short story writers, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, give an anecdote about Saunders’ accepting the kind of writer he is, and give a prompt from Saunders’ book to help generate words on the page.

Listen here:

Prompt for this week:

An Escalation Exercise from George Saunders’ A Swim in a Pond in the Rain.

Set a timer for, let’s say, forty-five minutes.

Now write a 200-word story. BUT the trick is: you get to use only 50 words to do it.

You’ll discover your own way of keeping track of the word count; one approach is to make a running list. Say, for example, that your first sentence turns out to be “A cow stood in the field.”

You write, at the bottom of the page, for reference:

1. A

2. Cow

3. Stood

4. In

5. The

6. Field

Now you “have” those 6 words to use going forward.

When you hit 50 words, that’s it: you have to start reusing words. (Let’s allow plurals. So “cow” and “cows” count as the same word.)

The final product is to be exactly 200 words (not 199, not 201).

Ready? Go.

You can try this same exercise with poetry: simply aim for a 100-word poem using only 25 or 30 words, or for a shorter poem, drawing from an even smaller word bank!