I love claims that begin that way, don’t you? Because obviously there are way more than two kinds of people, so whatever follows is going to be a massive oversimplification. But it’s tantalising, the idea that life could be so straightforward. Is it possible? Could humans, in all their infuriating complexity, really be reduced to only two types? I’ve got your attention now. There’s no way you’ll stop reading this blog before finding out my theory.
Before we get to it, here are my two favourite “two kinds of people” jokes:
There are 10 kinds of people: those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
There are two kinds of people. Those who can extrapolate from incomplete information.
In some ways, this is what you’re doing when you write a story. You’re taking the whole universe, which is so maddeningly complex that literally no-one understands how it works (because an astronomer doesn’t understand neuroscience, a neuroscientist doesn’t understand geology, and so on) and you’re boiling it down to something the reader can understand. Obviously you’ll lose a lot of important stuff along the way, but that’s the point. You’ll notice that the more you try to accommodate, the less you’ll actually accomplish. A story that tries to be about everything will inevitably be about nothing. Whereas a story about a single character trying to open a tin of spaghetti without a can-opener, well, that story might feel like it sums up the entirety of existence.
But when you’re dealing with characters, the “two kinds of people” approach completely falls apart. You don’t take complicated people and simplify them into types so they can go in your story. You actually do the opposite of that: you take real-life types of people and make up examples of those types. Because individual examples are more complex and interesting than just the categories that they fall into.
With that in mind, here’s my theory. There are two types of people: those who think they have impostor syndrome, and those who think they don’t.
It’s not very funny, is it? No matter. That’s what editing is for. And, like all other statements of this type, it leaves out a lot of people. But I still think there’s something to uncover here, if you’ll stick with me.
A quick refresher: impostor syndrome is when a skilled, experienced, qualified, talented person starts to doubt their own skills, experience, qualifications and talent. They start to think everyone around them is much more accomplished, and they worry about being exposed as a fraud.
This has been on my mind lately because one of my books, Kill Your Brother, was recently shortlisted for a Ned Kelly award. (Hooray!) I found out about this when I congratulated all the shortlisted authors, and someone else pointed out that I was among them. It had not occurred to me to check. I suppose I should have been embarrassed to be outed as someone who congratulates people without first checking who they are, but I was too excited about the shortlisting to care. When my agent congratulated me, I thanked him and said it was great to be among such heavy hitters. He said, “Jack, you are a heavy hitter.”
Add a bit of fear of being exposed, and that’s impostor syndrome. I thought all those other authors were real writers, who belonged on shortlists like that, and I didn’t. But if you’d asked me, I would not have said I had impostor syndrome. I would have said that I knew exactly what level I was at. It just turned out that I was wrong.
This got me wondering – is it even possible to know that you have impostor syndrome? How can you know that you’re underestimating yourself, without knowing that you’re better than you think you are? And then what about all those people who say they have impostor syndrome? Are they just fishing for compliments? I don’t think they are – they seem very sincere.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. I just started writing, in the hope that I would reach a conclusion. Eager, as always, to see if the messiness of life could be distilled. Sometimes it can’t. I’ll tell you what, though. The only real way to measure your skill at something is by doing it. And the next time the Booker Prize longlist is announced, I’m just going to take a quick peek before I post anything.
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