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Stephen King still gets nervous
At one point King asked for permission to use the other writer as a character and then wanted to send him the book, with instructions to read it and like it. The novelist could tell King was nervous and asked outright whether he actually was. King told him yes.
He then asked whether the nerves ever go away. King told him they never do.
That made Harlan Coben feel much better about his own fear. He is in a panic with every book and every TV show, sure that readers will hate it and that he will be found out as an impostor. He thinks the fear keeps a writer from phoning it in, and that for most people it paralyzes, while for him it fuels the work.
Why do successful people still feel like impostors?
Psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes described the impostor phenomenon in a 1978 paper, based on their clinical work with high-achieving women. People who experience it attribute their success to luck or error and expect to be exposed. Later research found the pattern across genders and many professions.
How does Stephen King write himself into books?
King appears as a character in the final volumes of his Dark Tower series, published in 2004. In the sixth and seventh books, a writer named Stephen King who lives in Maine becomes part of the plot. The series began with The Gunslinger in 1982.
Why can nerves improve performance?
In 1908 psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson reported that mice learned a task best at a moderate level of stress, with both weak and strong stimuli producing worse results. The finding became known as the Yerkes-Dodson law, which says performance rises with arousal up to a point and then falls. Later psychologists have debated how well the pattern holds for people.
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