Oops! Your claws are showing! Last time we talked about what to do when someone is jealous of your success. Now, on the other hand, what should you do if you’re the jealous one?

*First, try to distance yourself from the jealousy. Put some space between yourself and the other writer for a moment, and view the event objectively. What can you learn from this writer’s success experience? How did she find the right market for her book? How did he help promote his novel so that it got such great publicity? Did they do something you could use to boost your own success? Find the lesson in the experience.

*Second, choose to make that “enemy” into a friend. Rachel Simon, in The Writer’s Survival Guide, talked about one of her friends, Marianne, who was having great difficulty dealing with the success of another new writer. “The extreme heat of Marianne’s envy made her see just how much she wanted to succeed. So Marianne set herself to combating envy with harder work and, instead of seeing her friend as someone to revile, saw her friend as a pioneer leading the way. And so Marianne turned the object of her envy into an object of inspiration.”

*Third, don’t focus on someone else’s success, if it brings down your own self-esteem. Instead, get to work on your own manuscript! Your mind can only concentrate on one thing at a time, the experts tell us, so turn your attention away from the object of your jealousy and address your own writing. Bonnie Friedman agrees in her article, “Envy, the Writer’s Disease,” that the remedy for jealousy is focusing on your own work. “Not the thinking about it. Not the assessing of it. But the doing of it.”

*Fourth, develop a sense of humor. Probably one of the best ways to handle jealousy, if you can muster the courage, is to laugh about it. Laugh about it, you say? Ha! Well, I challenge you to read Anne Lamott’s chapter on jealousy in Bird by Bird and not laugh out loud. She doesn’t pull any punches, but her honesty about the not-so-nice feelings we can harbor about others is so refreshing. “Jealousy is such a direct attack on whatever measure of confidence you’ve been able to muster,” Anne says. “But if you continue to write, you are probably going to have to deal with it, because some wonderful, dazzling successes are going to happen for some of the most awful, angry, undeserving writers you know—people who are, in other words, not you.”

So the next time the green-eyed monster takes a chunk out of your hide, remember Scarlet O’Hara’s other famous line: “I’ll go crazy if I think about that now. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” And by the time tomorrow comes, you’ll be so involved in your own writing project again that the envy will shrink to its proper proportions.