By Michael Barrington
It has always hovered at the edge of my thoughts, but usually I’ve been able to drown it out in a pleasant fog of caffeine. Then came a summer holiday in Mexico with my wife. Daily we lounged by the pool; she with a book, I with my laptop. One afternoon she looked up, amused, “Two people just came over to sympathize with me for having a husband who brings his work on vacation,” she said. “I told them you’re a writer.”
Within hours, the information spread through the resort with the efficiency of a minor scandal. Unsolicited drinks began appearing. In the pool, people offered tentative smiles, whispered, pointed. In multiple languages, I was asked the dreaded question.
I had just finished writing another novel. This might sound impressive until I tell you what comes next—the editing and the dark thoughts of getting published. This is the stage where optimism is quietly dismantled, and an awful dread takes over: this is it—they’re going to find me out today. My cover will be blown. Not just as someone who hasn’t quite nailed the perfect sentence, but as someone who has committed the far greater crime of allowing himself to be called a writer.
Frankly, it feels outrageous. Like introducing myself as a concert pianist after just mastering “Chopsticks.” And on those social occasions when somebody says, “So, I hear you are a writer,” my mind does somersaults, my stomach ties itself in knots, and I fumble to find words that will curtail the conversation. God forbid they should ask, “What do you write?”
The trouble is not that I don’t write. I do. I persist, returning to the page day after day, occasionally with purpose, more often with stubbornness. I take comfort in the strange candor of Cormac McCarthy’s words; “I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored or failures at something else.”
Words appear. Sentences assemble themselves with varying degrees of cooperation. Paragraphs occasionally behave. But none of this seems to justify the title—writer. Surely there should be some formal process. Other professions require years of study, examinations — doctors, teachers, firefighters, all must prove themselves. Even plumbers are certified. Writers simply declare themselves or are declared as such. That feels suspiciously unregulated. “It simply cannot be,” my obsessive and incredulous mind screams, “there must be more.”
So, I find myself imagining a test. A literary gauntlet. A panel of greats ready to assess my worth.
Charles Dickens sits at the head of a long table, peering over his spectacles. Jane Austen raises an eyebrow. George Orwell taps a pen thoughtfully. Margaret Atwood in her low, ironic, monotone, tells me to sit. My application lies before them, thin and unconvincing. I mumble almost incoherently about my professional identity issues.
“Has he suffered enough?” Dickens asks the panel as though it were a prerequisite. No answer.
“Has he observed society with sufficient wit?” Austen enquires demurely. No answer.
“Has he told the truth?” George Orwell, unwilling to settle for anything less. No answer.
I am jittery, a bundle of nerves and attempt a response, apologizing for the quality of my work.
“Nobody is making you write. So don’t whine,” Atwood says, her soft Canadian accent cutting through the tension. “And oh, by the way, you might write from the heart, but you’d better polish with your brain.”
At which point I am advised to try again in a few decades and summarily dismissed.
The absurdity, of course, is that even those greats were not immune to this creeping suspicion. Austen wrote to a friend, “My style is too light and unpretending to suit the pen of a great author.” And to her sister, “How ill I have written, I begin to hate myself.”
Then there is Maya Angelou, Pulitzer nominee, who admitted, “I have written eleven books, but each time I think, ‘Uh oh, they’re going to find out now.’” Eleven books! At that point, one might expect a small, town parade in her honor, a prime-time interview on PBS or at least a certificate. Instead: self-doubt; suspicion.
Even Hemingway—who prose appears so controlled, offered the reassuring but unglamorous comment: “The first draft of anything is shit.” Which is comforting, except when you realize your second and third drafts are merely… tidier shit.
And so the fraudulence persists.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is the mythology surrounding writing. I imagine F. Scott Fitzgerald working with effortless grace, or Toni Morrison formulating sentences of such clarity they seem inevitable. I cannot imagine them editing a paragraph thinking, why does this sound like nails on a chalkboard?
And perhaps that is where the unease originates. The expectation that writing should feel certain, when in fact it rarely does. When writing is not mastery, but a disciplined form of uncertainty. And the more I read about writers, the more I suspect that feeling like a fraud is not a disqualifying condition—it may, in fact, be a prerequisite. A sort of secret handshake. Perhaps if you’re certain of your brilliance, you may have taken a wrong turn somewhere. Kurt Vonegut’s words playing in my head like a mantra, keep me grounded: “When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.”
So, what is to be done?
Waiting, unfortunately, is not an option. That moment, like a delayed bus in the rain, may never come. Or, as Margaret Atwood says in her own inimitable fashion, “If you are waiting for the perfect moment, you’ll never write a thing because it will never arrive.”
Instead, I must do the deeply inconvenient thing: continue. John Steinebck lays it out with irritating clarity: “The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” Ahah! So, it’s not confidence so much, as necessary self-deception.
Stephen King is even less sentimental: “Amateurs sit and wait for inspiration; the rest of us just get up and go to work.” This is both motivating and mildly insulting, which is perhaps exactly what I need to hear.
Then, of course, there is Samuel Beckett, who distilled the entire enterprise into a line that manages to be both bleak and oddly encouraging: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” It is difficult to feel like a fraud when failure is not only expected but actively recommended. Eureka! Perhaps that is the key? Can I now finally throw away the Tums and Pepto-bismal?
But my obsessive conscience interrupts: WAIT! There is also the small matter of permission—or rather, the lack of it. No one, it turns out, is in charge of handing out the title should I ever reach the literary heights of being called a “writer.” There is no ceremony, no stirring music, no cap and gown, no velvet-lined box containing the Official Writer’s plaque. So how would my weak writing ego be satisfied?
I would very much like a formal letter at least. Something along the lines of:
Dear Sir,
After due consideration, we formally acknowledge your sustained practice of writing and hereby recognize your entitlement to the title of Writer, despite your understandable reservations.
Please accept this confirmation with our sincere regrets.
Yours faithfully,
The Committee
Until such a letter appears—if ever—there is only the work. Sentences that resist, then relent. Paragraphs that occasionally align. And the quiet, stubborn discipline of placing one word after another, even as something in me keeps asking, who do you think you are? The doing comes first. The identity, if it comes at all, trails behind like a reluctant guest I’m almost afraid to welcome.
So, I return to the page—the cursor blinking, patient and expectant. Sentences falter, hesitate, begin again. I stay. Not because I’m certain, but because I don’t know what else to do with this need to try, to make something, to say something that feels even briefly true.
And maybe I am a fraud. That thought doesn’t quite go away. But neither does this quiet pull back to the page, this small, persistent hope that if I keep showing up, something honest will eventually meet me there. Perhaps I have also reached the age at which those who have been through the wash-and-spin cycle a few times become seized by the notion that their own experience in the suds may be relevant to others.
I write—uncertain, unconvinced, but unwilling to stop. And for now, that has to be enough.
Michael Barrington, an award-winning English author, has written 13 books, mainly historical and literary fiction,and published more than 60 short stories and articles in the USA, Europe and UK. Take a Priest Like You (2025) is a memoir. His current novel, Colourblind ( April 2026), recounts an untold World War II story of Black troops being welcomed with open arms by a small English village and the US military’s failed attempts to impose racism and segregation and the violence that followed.
