Rising with the Rest

It’s easy to be competitive without realising it. We’re subtly taught from a young age that winning is good, losing is bad, and everyone is ranked on how successful they are all the time (no matter what that looks like). This success might be that someone is wealthier than you, or in the world of writing, has more books published, more books sold, or they have a publishing deal with a big name publisher and you don’t.

This leads, of course, to comparing yourself with others, and to bringing yourself down because you don’t see yourself as being as successful as whoever it is you’re comparing yourself to. That ingrained sense of competition tugs at you, nags in your thoughts at night, and leads to imposter syndrome for so many of us.

In human society, being competitive is good, for the most part. It leads to personal drive, and to our most basic of needs: survival. But it can also be a hindrance. It can crush that drive, even when we thought we were doing well, and it can make us believe we aren’t good enough and so we should not even try.

Having a support network of people who push you, and make you rise to the top, is amazing and awesome and helps many people survive through the hard times. But what about being that support person for others?

There’s no law against it. You’re only fighting your own inner voice that says “why should I congratulate this person on their success when they never congratulated me?” It’s easy to sink into this mindset.

There are plenty of memes out there celebrating women supporting other women, or industry leaders showing their joy at grass-roots foundations: in essence, rising together. But it’s hard to put this into practice, especially when you feel like you’re struggling alone, and the only people who are supporting you don’t really get what it’s like to be a writer.

At the Ages of Pages book fair this year (2026) I met many wonderful authors, and had fascinating discussions with them. One was hard on herself for only publishing one book, when I had three, but on my other side, the author there had sixteen books. Should we only congratulate the one who has written sixteen? Or do they all deserve our praise?

It can be easy to give compliments, but hard to take them. It can be easy to take compliments, but hard to give them! At first, I was shy. I wasn’t sure what to say, or how to compliment, but as the day wore on I began to live that “yass queen!” mentality. Boosting other people without being competitive, without needing a response, actually made me feel good, and a part of something, and it certainly made me feel less alone, knowing that there were so many others out there doing exactly what I was doing and also feeling alone in their writing caves.

The author who wrote 16 books had an OMG moment when a very successful, very prolific author came up to her table and bought the entire box set of her series. This famous author gushed about how much she loved them, bought the books, and went away, leaving the author in a dazed sense of “what just happened?” She was a huge fan, but she didn’t want to blurt out how much of a fan she was, because of the setting we were in: we were all authors, sharing our tales, and therefore colleagues. I was quick to tell her how awesome this was, and how lovely that her writing resonated with so many people.

We look at those who are very successful and think: oh, they don’t need boosting. They don’t need compliments. They get it all the time. But sometimes a comment, coming from a colleague, can be what they needed. And they may return this, giving back the boost.

We don’t need to be competitive in this field. There is room for all of us, and if we give rise to others, they will return the favour, and together we all succeed – whatever that success looks like to us.

I loved learning about the authors I was standing next to in the book fair: what they wrote about, who their target market was, and quite often I ended up recommending their books to the readers browsing my stall, only to hear them, later in the day, doing the same for me.

When we give space and support to those around us, we all rise. You don’t have to be a continuous cheerleader, but every little bit helps.