I’ve met, interviewed and shared stages with many authors over the years, and seen all too many signs of pride and oversensitivity to criticism. There is an inherent egotism in believing your voice matters – but that’s no reason not to put pen to paper

Many years ago, when I had just started writing books about philosophy, I got talking to two of my newly acquired peers. I asked one what he was currently working on, which as conversational gambits go is about as original as asking a novelist where she gets her ideas from. Having heard his answer, I perhaps tactlessly noted that quite a lot of books had recently appeared on this subject. “Yes,” he said, “but I really do think mine will be the best.”

“Really?” I asked, perhaps too incredulously.

“Yes, I do,” he said, with utmost sincerity. The second writer eagerly chipped in: “You have to believe your book is going to be the best, otherwise you’d never write it.”

I dissented, saying that it was enough to be interested in the subject, to believe there might be something worth saying about it, and then to do your best. You aim for your target but remain agnostic about whether you’ll hit it.

Although I would still endorse this view, I’m no longer sure it’s what I truly feel deep down. The vast majority of writers, if they have a modicum of self-awareness, must know that they probably belong among the literary also-rans rather than the exceptional elites. In my own case, I know I am not the cleverest or most original thinker and my prose is not the most beautiful. But if I am honest, somewhere inside me, probably not too far beneath the apparently modest surface, is the hubristic belief that if I can apply my skills of clear exposition and synthesis to the right subject, I might just write a book of exceptional worth.

I doubt that I am unusual. I’ve met, interviewed and shared stages with many writers over the years, and the majority have come across as modest, grounded people. Only one has turned up in a hotel lobby wearing sunglasses, and that was a performer turned author. Of all the speakers at one literary festival which requires participants to wear head-set microphones, only two have so far refused to do so because it messed up their hair – both male. And yet although the writing profession is generally free of the ostentatious egotism of rock’n’roll, the ways in which it is infused with vanity have become increasingly evident to me. The excessive admiration or pride in their own work that I detected in those two writers would reappear time and again, and eventually I would come to recognise it in myself.

The setting of that early conversation – a book launch – was itself evidence of a culture of vanity. When such soirees are held for big names at swanky bars with A-star guest lists and superior canapes, they can be justified as promotion, softening up critics and review-section editors with free food and booze. But most launches involve publishers, authors and their friends nibbling nuts and sipping cheap Chilean Merlot in an obliging bookshop. Their function is simply to massage the author’s ego. You could put that in a nicer way and say it is to celebrate publication of their book, but it adds up to the same thing.

This is all perfectly understandable. Writing a book is a major undertaking, but 150,000 are published in the UK every year and of these, the vast majority appear without fanfare and then sink without trace. A small gathering means the writer’s endeavours are recognised at least once, and recognition is something most writers crave.

The more experience I have of writers, the more I notice their little signs of vanity, such as the tendency of many to bring the conversation back to their own works at the slightest provocation. “As I wrote in my …” is an all-too-typical monologue opener. It’s a common vice, of course, but given that writers are supposed to be exceptionally curious people, you would have hoped that they would be less inclined to make themselves the focus than others. Perhaps it simply reflects the fact that for all a writer must be interested in the world, he must also deeply explore his own view of it.

People know that boasting is unseemly, but a certain amount of self-promotion has become obligatory in publishing, with authors sometimes contractually obliged to blog, tweet or maintain some kind of other social media presence. Expanding your ego becomes part of the job and what is initially undertaken as a necessary evil can easily morph into habitual self-aggrandisement. Indeed, as publishing evolves in this way, selection pressures might mean that the average author these days is just more vainglorious. I know at least one person who has several strong book ideas who is put off trying to take them further because he can’t stand all the promotional work that would go with it. And there are plenty being published whose brands seem to be more powerful than their brains.

The clearest evidence of writerly vanity, however, is seen in responses to criticisms, no matter how mild, or even merely supposed. I once had someone tweet angry reprimands on the basis of a misleadingly reported comment about him attributed to me in a review of one of my books. Even after I emailed the aggrieved author to explain, no apology or retraction was forthcoming. (I’ll refer to all the writers I’ve anonymised as “he” since most are male, but there are many women among their number.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘One scathing review still sticks in my gut’ … Julian Baggini. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod

This sensitivity among writers bothers me since I do a fair amount of reviewing and see it as an obligation to be as fair and constructive as possible without deceiving the reader into thinking a book might be better than it is. But I worry that, because the publishing world is not that large, the existence of so many thin skins alters how people behave within in it. Reviewing becomes infected with biases created by friendships and enmities. That’s why I decline to review books that I have good reason to assume I will probably dislike, especially by authors I have reason to think are especially tetchy.

Time and again I have seen writers pricked by mild criticism, even when reviews on balance have been positive. Once, for instance, I wrote what I thought to be a rave review of a book on one of the most-written-about subjects in human history. I suggested that the author had solved the problem of how to say something new about a subject about which everything had already been said, by putting the best bits together in the best possible way. He wrote back, thanking me for the good things I said but also to say he was “devastated” by the suggestion of unoriginality.

The worst example of an over-sensitive author came when I reviewed a memoir, rather generously, it seems to me. I then received an email from the author threatening to sue me. My mistake had been that I reported that he had hit his “wife” – when in fact the couple had merely been cohabiting.

But it’s all too easy to see vices in others that you fail to notice in yourself, and I would be a sanctimonious liar if I did not admit to my own pride. One scathing review still sticks in my gut, to such an extent that I was surprised when, several years later, I found myself sharing a long lift to a book festival with the reviewer without venting my rage at him. I could accept his opinion that I was “not a natural writer”, although the fact that I still vividly remember that phrase might count as evidence that I protest too little. What got me was that several criticisms were based on egregious misrepresentations of what I wrote. But why would I have been so wounded by this if I weren’t worried too much about what people who read the review would think of me? It’s vanity again. I wasn’t bothered, for example, by the glowing review of my last book which nonetheless completely misrepresented some of its central arguments. You don’t hear authors complaining about inaccurate good reviews.

It is disappointing that the very people who are supposed to be the most acute chroniclers of the human condition have the same foibles as anyone else. But there is more to it than that shared human weakness. There is an inherent vanity in writing; believing you have something special to offer the world is built-in to the very act of putting your work out into the world.

However, that’s no reason not to do it. To strive to do most things of ambition or potential importance requires some element of vanity, which is at root nothing more than daring to believe that there might be some significance in what we insignificant creatures do. And knowing you are not the best is no reason not to try an excursion to their ranks.

Vanity may be in that sense unavoidable but it does not mean we must allow it to be our master. By recognising our vanity, we can try to keep it as much at bay as possible and so keep pride in check. If we cannot see the vanity in what we’re doing or deny there is any, we are more likely to fall under its spell. The ultimate vanity is to believe you have none.