Years ago, when Annie Hall came out, a friend and fellow screenwriter started going around telling people he’d written the film. Since his name wasn’t either Woody Allen or Marshall Brickman, I had some concerns. I called him up and asked him what he was trying to do.

"Save my sanity," he replied, only half-kidding. "I figure if I can convince everybody I wrote it, I won’t go crazy with envy."

Well, that’s one way to deal with it, I thought. After all, for a writer, envy’s a fact of life.

"Very creative," I said.

"Thanks," he said, chuckling. "And it sure beats hell out of my first idea, which was running Woody over with a truck."

I was thinking about this conversation the other day, as one of my clients struggled with his own writing issues. Despite some of the gains made in therapy, he felt his work was continually undermined by his envy of other writers.

He’d had to stop reading the trades, he told me, because seeing the deals being made by others angered and deflated him. He’d grown increasingly self-critical about his work habits---normally a source of pride and satisfaction---since hearing rumors about a well-known screenwriter’s penchant for "knocking out a script" in a week. It had reached a point where learning of a friend’s having lunch with a studio exec or potential new agent could trigger a depression.

None of these feelings were unfamiliar to me. During my screenwriting career, it almost seemed as though envy was the ocean my friends and I swam in. For some, of course, hearing of another’s success was a spur to greater efforts. For others, the result was often a crippling paralysis.

It took me a long time to understand, and to accept, that envy is a natural by-product of the achieving life. Throughout out our childhood experiences in our families, and then our schools, and ultimately in the adult world, we strive to achieve in a matrix of others who strive to achieve---such that comparison is not only inevitable, but often the only standard by which to measure that achievement.

With time and maturity, we hopefully develop the self-awareness (and self-acceptance) to measure ourselves by more internal monitors; to enjoy the expression of our creative talents for their own sake.

But we also live in the real world, and need the validation of that world. For a writer, that means enduring intense competition, and the almost daily spectacle of others enjoying extravagant rewards in fame and money, all while negotiating the often gut-wrenching peaks and valleys of one’s own career.

In other words, that means living with envy.

The key to surviving envy, as with all feelings evoked in the stress of the achieving life, is to acknowledge it.

By that, I’m not referring merely to the fact that you’re envious, but rather the meaning that you give to it.

If a writer sees his envy as a sign of some kind of moral weakness or character failing---a view often engendered and reinforced in childhood---the effect on his work can be quite debilitating.

Equally harmful is seeing one’s envy as a disparaging comment on one’s work. I once had a client try to disavow her envy of another’s success, lest she experience it as confirmation of a lack of faith in her own writing. "If I let myself feel envious," she said, "it means I don’t believe in the possibility of my own success."

Another client bravely insisted that "envy is counter-productive." So terrified of anything that might derail his firmly-held belief in "positive thinking," the meaning he gave to envy---as well as any other "negative" feeling---was of an insidious obstacle on the tracks of his forward momentum.

Only by investigating what envy means to us can we risk acknowledging it. After all, it’s just a feeling, like other feelings, which means it’s also information. If nothing else, envy informs us of how important our goals are. It reminds us of the reasons we undertook the creative life in the first place, and challenges us to commit once again to its rigors and rewards.

So the choice is yours. You can deny your envy, or celebrate it. You can talk it to death among your friends, or suffer in silence. Or, hopefully, you can accept it with humor and self-acknowledgment, and perhaps explore what its meaning is for you.

But one thing I know. For a writer, to coin a phrase, nothing’s certain except death and taxes. And envy.