This is The Write Now Podcast with Sarah Werner, episode 122: Seeking Validation.

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m your host, Sarah Werner. Today, I want to talk about validation. Whether we realize it consciously or not, a lot of us writers spend large amounts of our time and energy seeking validation. If you’ve ever posted something to social media and then constantly refreshed it and refreshed your feed every three or four minutes just to see if someone has liked it yet or responded to it yet, you’re searching for validation. If you have a podcast and on the day that an episode launches, if you find yourself refreshing your statistics page to see, “Has anyone downloaded yet? Has anyone left me a comment yet?” you’re searching for validation. If you’ve ever sent a draft of your novel, or one of your poems to a friend or a family member, and then just sat at your desk anxiously hopping up and down, waiting for their response, you’re searching for validation.

We want to know whether our work is good, whether our work is meaningful, whether our work is important. Heck, we even just want to know that our work has been seen or heard or acknowledged in some way. We’re searching for that hit of dopamine that we get in our system when we get a positive review or a like on social media or a book sale. This makes sense, right? We crave validation. We put so much work and love and parts of ourselves into our creative work. A lot of us want to know, “Hey, I’m not doing this for nothing. I’m not being ignored. I’m not invisible. I’m part of something. I’m part of this tribe of writers. I’m part of this community of storytellers.

I think ultimately, we want to know that we belong and that we are not being shunned. I think that’s a very primal need. We want to be seen, we want our work to resonate with people, and so we look to other people to tell us that they have seen us, that they have read our work, that they have witnessed the little piece of ourselves that we put into each one of our creations. The search for validation, the need for validation, I think, is drilled into us at a very early age. Our behavior is judged and evaluated and corrected by our parents, family members, guardians, caretakers, people who are invested in how we turn out. We’re taught that there’s a right way and a wrong way of doing things and that if we do things the right way, we are praised and rewarded and allowed to be a part of the community.

Later in school, this is taken a step further. In addition to being told that there’s a right way and a wrong way to do things, we also get introduced to a grading scale, or at least you do if you went to public school like I did. I’m not sure what kind of school you went to, but there were varying degrees to which you aligned with the ultimate correctness. If you were extremely, extremely correct, you got an A, so we had letter grades: A, B, C, D, and then F. I don’t know why there was not an E. There was not an E. There was just A, B, C, D, and F.

If you did well, you got an A. If the things that you did and the projects you completed and the homework you turned in aligned with the set ideal of correct and good, you got a good grade, you got an A. If it was slightly off or sloppy or messy or slightly wrong, you would get descending grades, a B, a C. If you didn’t try or didn’t put in the effort or were just very, very wrong, you would get a D, or unthinkably, at least unthinkably for me, an F. “F” stood for “fail” and that was when you just completely failed to align with the understood concept of good for whatever assignment you were working on.

These grades, in turn, told us how good we were at different things and became part of our identity. I spent much of my educational career as a straight-A student. I’m not trying to brag, I’m just saying that that became my identity. My identity was I excelled in my classes and I got good grades. This was part of my identity. This is how people saw me. It set the expectation for what people wanted from me, so if one semester I got a B or a C in a class, my teachers would be very concerned and say, “What’s wrong? You’re slipping,” whereas if a student who is known for getting straight Ds in classes got a B or a C, that would be treated as a good thing because they were steadily “improving.” This is really what’s interesting is that this very objective grading scale can be so very subjective when it comes to validation and to our identities.

Some classes I coasted in because it was easier for me, just because of my skillsets and the things that I did at home. Other classes, getting that A was extremely difficult and I had to study and use flashcards and really stay up late wrestling with the subjects. English class was always relatively easy for me. I had grown up reading and writing and internalized those skills and so all I needed to do to keep up in class was make sure that I read the material. Other subjects, such as math or chemistry, I remember staying up late wrestling with the material, wracking my brain, calling myself names, throwing my pencils across the room when I was doing my homework out of frustration and anger because I wanted those As. I wanted to be good. I wanted to do my work correctly. Doing my work correctly meant expending different amounts of energy in different subjects.

An A didn’t necessarily mean I was pushing myself or learning or growing, an A simply meant I was conforming to the standard that had been set by my teachers. I simply had to work harder at that for some subjects than others. The grades that I got had absolutely nothing, or I don’t want to say “absolutely.” The grades that I earned had very little to do with how much I was actually learning and growing. I can’t stress that enough. I wonder if you had a similar experience, that your grades did not reflect how much you learned and grew as a person, or even learned and grew along with the subject matter, but by how well your results conformed with the standard, with the expected answer?

I promise I’m going somewhere with this. I’m not going to spend this entire podcast episode talking about grades in school, but I think it’s important to talk about because it set us up for how we later thought about and created and grew within our art. Today, when we post something to social media, when we send that draft of our novel to a friend or a relative to read, when we publish a podcast episode, when we publish our novel, and then we spend so much time refreshing the page, refreshing our email inbox, refreshing our reviews, refreshing our statistics, looking for validation, looking for whether or not we have conformed to some kind of standard, whether we have succeeded in our task, whether we are good enough. If you’re anything like me, and maybe you are, and maybe you aren’t, that’s not a requirement to listen to this podcast, but if you’re anything like me, you’re still searching for that A or that A+, because yeah, if it was possible to get an A+ in a subject, you better bet that I was looking for that A+.

But I have to ask you a question: Despite our training, despite the labels and the associations of good and bad with different grades, this is all based on a system of conforming to someone else’s standard, whether our work is valid or not in someone else’s eyes. Will people like the picture that we posted on Instagram? I don’t know. It depends what their standards are. It depends what they understand as good or bad. It only has a little bit to do with you and a lot to do with how you’re conforming to what is acceptable, what is valid in our society at this current moment. Things go in and out of fashion, in and out of style, and it can be exhausting to keep up with what is currently valid and what is currently not valid. My question is: Do we want to compare and weigh and value our life’s work against a fleeting, ever-changing standard?

I looked up the definition of “valid” just because I’m a nerd and I wasn’t 100% sure what it meant. It’s a word that I’ve seen used a lot lately and I use it a lot myself. When somebody gives me a reasonable opinion or a thoughtful statement, I’ll say, “Oh, that’s really valid,” or, “Oh, it’s really valid that you’re feeling that way,” but I didn’t actually know the technical definition of “valid,” so I looked it up. “Valid” is an adjective with a couple of different definitions. The first definition is: “Valid is having a sound basis in logic or fact. It’s reasonable or cogent. Example: A valid criticism.” The other meanings of valid are even more legalistic than that and have to do with “Legally binding due to having been executed in compliance with the law or legally,” or “Legally or officially acceptable. Example: The visas are valid for 30 days.”

It really struck me how much of the word and sense of “valid” is rooted in law. Again, in right and wrong, and how much of law is a social construction that keeps us conformed as a community. All of these things are related. I’m also not saying that conformity is necessarily wrong, right? I want to conform with the laws of my society so that I can be a good neighbor, so that I can be a good community member, so I can be a contributing member of society. I don’t want to go around running red lights and murdering people. It’s just rude. I conform to these laws because I see value in them and they are worth pursuing to me, right? Murdering someone is wrong. I’m not going to murder someone. I’d feel really awful if I murdered someone. I would destroy their life and their family and probably my life, too. It’s just, it doesn’t make any sense logically. Murdering is not a great idea.

But there are other standards and almost laws that I agree a little bit less with based on my value system, such as not wearing white shoes after Labor Day. That’s one of those cultural norms that I don’t know if it’s gone out of style or not, but I don’t really care about it. It does not feel morally important to me. I will wear white shoes whenever I want because I don’t care what other people think about my sense of style. Or in the culinary world, there used to be this adage that, “Oh, you don’t pair white meat with red wine. You pair white wine with white meat and red wine with red meat.” You know what? I love red wine and I will drink it with just about anything: fish, chicken, vegetarian and vegan dishes because I like what I like and I don’t want anyone else to tell me what I can or can’t do regarding my own aesthetics. There’s examples of this in the writing world, too. Things go in and out of style: Flashbacks, monologues, manners of speaking ways in which we tell our stories, expansions into larger casts, addition of A and B and C plots.

What is accepted, what is approved, what is valid, I think, changes constantly. Here’s a question that I want you to think about: What does validation of your work look like for you? Because again, we all have that craving to be seen and heard and known and understood and accepted, but whose terms are we doing that on? Who’s setting the standard, who’s setting the terms? To whom are we looking for validation? Who is setting that standard? If you’re like me, you’re wondering, “How do I get an A+ today in my adult life where there aren’t any teachers and I don’t have a governing authority to tell me whether my work is correct or incorrect, whether my work is right or wrong, unless I do something like submit my work for publication, or submit my work to a contest, or submit my work to a beta reader, or self-publish my book and wait for the reviews to roll in?” But how we are validated is such an integral part of our personality and our identity. Are we really willing to put that into the hands of strangers?

I had a friend who self-published a book and she called me one afternoon and she was so upset. She said, “Sarah, my book just got a one-star review on Amazon and this person was so mean and they said I was worthless and that I should die,” and just really all of these terrible things. I read the review and it was just awful. I told my friend that “This is one person’s opinion. They’re obviously bringing some of their own baggage to this review because they have no reason to hate you as much as they say they do. They don’t know you. They simply bought a copy of your book and didn’t like it. Your work is not for everyone.” My friend said, “Yeah, I know,” but I know she still carries that review around in her head. I know she’s made it part of her identity as a writer. In her mind, she had been given an F by this person, a failing grade, and she saw her book as a failure.

This happens so often. I mean, heck, I still carry around my one-star reviews in my mind for Girl In Space, for The Write Now Podcast. We have this thing called a “negativity bias.” I won’t get into all of that right now. You can look it up if you’re interested. It’s really fascinating. We can get 10 five-star reviews and one one-star review, and you know what we’re going to remember and fixate on and focus on? It’s that one-star review. Even though it’s drowned out by positive reactions and reviews, we’re still going to latch on to that one-star review and pick it apart in our mind for years and clutch it to our chest and say, “This is part of me now, someone else’s judgment,” when really, maybe that person had a bad day or is taking their anger out on your work. You don’t deserve to internalize their nastiness.

This is where searching for validation can get really, really messy because often when we’re told by one person, or a small group, or even a large group, that our work is not good, or our work is not valid, or our work is not correct in some way, we let that define us, even though we may have never met these people who are judging our work and we may not share the same value system that they do. Searching for external validation can be so dangerous because a lot of the time, if we receive negative feedback, I’ve seen a lot of writers give up and stop creating because they assume that there are no good. No good compared to what standard?

I’m not saying that everything you create is magical and perfect. I mean, it’s magical because it’s part of you, but you’re going to go through your life, and not everything you make is going to be your best work. In fact, 20 years from now, you might look back at the work you’re creating today and cringe, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make it. You still need to create it because you need to learn and grow and how we learn and grow and get better is by continually honing our craft and looking for feedback not from internet strangers, not even from random judges at contests.

I have to tell you just real quick, I’ve talked to so many creators who have submitted their work to contests and have not gone on to the next round, or received feedback that their work was lacking, and it’s like, who is this judge? Just because somebody judging a contest does not mean they know what they’re talking about. Literally, anyone can open up a contest for a short story or a poem or whatever submission. I could open up a poetry contest and pick my favorite poem, but that’s so subjective. Really, do I know anything about poetry? I mean, a little bit, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable judging a poetry contest. But there are some people out there who know a lot less about poetry than I do who would feel very comfortable judging your poems and telling you that yours is no good by whatever their standards are. We have no idea what their standards are, what their education is like, what they’ve learned, what they value. Anyway. External validation can be so dangerous, especially when we let it A, define us, and B, determine whether we’re going to keep going.

When my mom was a little kid, she submitted a poem to an English class and the teacher told her it was no good and she was not a good writer. My mother is in her late 60s today and is still convinced she is not a good writer because after that, she gave up and she didn’t try again. That just breaks my heart. If we’re going to learn and grow, we do need criticism, we do need guidance, but we need to understand and choose who we’re asking to review our work. We have to be very careful about this. You can’t just post something for the general Internet and ask for feedback. Who are these people? Do they value the same things you value? Do they appreciate literature, or poetry, or whatever it is you’re writing or creating? Yes, get opinions on your work, submit your work for validation, but make sure it’s to people whose validation you actually value. Even then, take their criticism with a grain of salt.

Neil Gaiman has very famously said that “If someone you trust points out that there’s something in your writing that doesn’t quite work, you should listen to them, but you should not listen to their response on how to fix that problem. That’s up to you. They’re always right,” he says, “when they point out that there’s a problem. They’re nearly always wrong when they tell you how to fix it.” I know that some of you are saying, or thinking, or conveying in some way, “Sarah, this is all fine and good if your work is actually receiving responses, but what if you are publishing a podcast, or publishing short stories, or poems, or if you’ve published your novel, and nobody is reading or listening to or watching or seeing it? What happens if you don’t have an audience at all? What if you’re searching for validation and you’re coming up empty?”

I want to say two things: First, we’ve spent a lot of time in this episode talking about external validation, but there is such thing as internal validation, the validation that you put upon your own work. I know the internal validation does not carry the same satisfaction that getting externally validated does, but I really want us to be able to feel meaningful, like our work matters. I don’t want our self-worth to hinge on what someone says about us or our work or fails to say about us or our work. Again, I encourage you to share your work with someone who’s aesthetic values and whose moral values, et cetera, you trust, and say, “Hey, I wrote this. I would just feel so honored if you would read it. Thank you.”

If you’re looking for a larger audience, audience-building is an entirely different Write Now podcast episode entirely. We will get to that, or you can go back through the catalog of old episodes. I think I have a few in there on finding and developing your audience. But for now, I want you to know that if you feel compelled to create something, as so many of us do, I believe that you’re compelled to create this, to tell your story, to put pictures or words onto a page. You’re compelled to create for a reason. That reason speaks to the very core of you as a human individual who has intrinsic meaning and worth. You matter and your story matters. I know that’s hard to remember sometimes when we feel alone, we feel isolated, we feel worthless. We feel all sorts of really awful things, especially if we struggle with depression, anxiety, any of those other really nasty things that crawl into our brain.

In times like that, I want you to turn to a creative community, whether that is a group of friends from school who took similar classes, whether that is trusted friends or family members, whether that is a writing mentor, whether that is simply a group of writers on Discord or Slack or Facebook or somewhere else that you’ve grown to know and like and trust. If you don’t have a community like that, I encourage you to find one or create one yourself because we need people we can trust with our work. What does validation look like for you and where are you seeking it and from whom are you seeking it? These are such important questions. I encourage you to think about them this week, whether you just think about them while you’re on a treadmill, or on a walk, or if you decide to journal about them.

Let me know your relationship with validation. Let me know how you see validation of your work and what it means to you. You can let me know in the comments for the show notes for today’s episode. If you go out to sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R, and navigate to this episode, episode number 122, if you scroll down to the show notes for that page, you’ll see a comment box, and you are free to submit your thoughts and feelings there. I do read and respond to every single comment that I get on my website. I’m not able to respond to every email that I get anymore, but I do read and personally respond to every single comment out on my website, so I invite you to join the conversation. Let me know your thoughts. I’m really interested to see how you validate your work, how you see it being validated, and who you look to for validation.

I create The Write Now Podcast for free for a global audience. I want to make sure that everyone has access to this show and I would not be able to do this without the beautiful and generous support of my patrons out on Patreon. Patreon is a secure third-party donation platform that allows you to donate a dollar per episode, $2 per episode, $20 per episode, a zillion dollars per episode, whatever it is that works best for you. If this is something that you would like to do, I invite you to please, yes, happily, generously donate. You can do that out on my website, sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H W-E-R-N-E-R dot com. Scroll to the show notes for today’s episode and click Help Support This Podcast. I would greatly appreciate it.

That money goes toward hosting costs, it goes toward equipment costs, it goes toward my time and preparation for the show. It also goes to making sure that each episode is transcribed so that it is accessible for everybody regardless of ability. Yes, I have gone through every single episode of The Write Now Podcast, and transcripts, full transcripts, are now available for every single episode. That is in part thanks to the generous donations of my patrons out on Patreon, so thank you for that.

I would especially like to thank Kayla Mary Heal, Christine Black, Laurie, Regina Calabrese, Evie Knight, Garrett, Leslie Duncan, Mark Bullock, Michael Beckwith, Mike Taft, Sarah Lauzon, Sean Locke, Summer, Tiffany Joiner, Tim Shen, and Whitney Magruder for their once again generous and beautiful donations. Thank you all of you for doing what you do to support this show and to support and encourage writers all over the world. Thank you.

A few quick mentions: First, if you are looking for a writing community to join, please come join my writers’ group out on Discord. Discord is just a messaging platform similar to Slack. It’s free. All you need is the link to join, which I will provide here in the show notes for today’s episode, so go ahead and click that Discord link. Make your account if you don’t have one already. I would love to see you in our writing community. It is just in the same sense of this podcast, so just very warm and nurturing and encouraging, and again, I would love to see you there.

Secondly, I have a really cool opportunity. I’ve been invited to interview one of my favorite writers, Anne Lamott this upcoming May 24th, 2021. It’s going to be virtual and tickets are free. It’s going to be 1:00 PM Central on May 24th. If you want to snag a ticket, I will also provide that link in the show notes for today’s episode, so lots going on in the show notes.

With that, this has been episode 122 of The Write Now Podcast, the podcast that helps all writers, aspiring, professional, and otherwise to find the time, energy, and courage you need to pursue your passion and write. I’m Sarah Werner and I think that you’re pretty valid.