To the Writer Who's Finished Their First Draft—and Hates It

It's Normal to Feel This Way

Dear writer,

I hear you—it’s hard. You feel discouraged, hopeless, a little bereft. Good. Good, I say! This is normal. It’s the end of a project, after all, and these past several months—hell, these past few years—have been no picnic.

Welcome to the despondency of being a writer. I know you think you may not be cut out for this, that you’ll never do it again, but now is not the time for that. Now is the time for rest. It is okay to feel like this, to hate what you’ve written and wonder if you’ll ever write another word.

Photo by Dexter Jacobs on Unsplash

Now, go eat a pizza, take a walk, spend the weekend with your family. See a movie, buy some chocolate, enjoy yourself. But whatever you do, don’t consider the questions regarding your future as a writer. Don’t contemplate whether you’ve got “another one” in you. You don’t. Nobody does.

You have now emptied yourself, and this is what empty feels like. Try to enjoy it, this brief window before you, the space between what you’ve made and what could be made—because soon you’ll be back at it, back to work, back to that nagging sense of incompletion.

Try to think of that documentary I told you about, the one where the artist paints the world’s largest stained glass window, a commission earning over $3.5 million, completely altering the course of his career forever. Remember when he, gazing at his own creation that has strangers bursting into tears, says, “I don’t hate it”?

Remember that?

That’s about all you can hope for. Art is ego-destroying work, writing especially so. It will eradicate any notion of self you have and demand to be recognized as the source of life itself. Honor it as best you can, understanding you are but a vessel through which it can work its magic.

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To write anything at all is difficult, to do it well is damn near impossible. That should never be your aim. Seek to have completed something. Hope that it holds together, that it coheres. This is your goal in writing: not to make it beautiful but to simply make it work. Beauty comes with practice; cogency is underrated.

And if you ever happen to get something so magnanimous as a break, take it. Relish the illusion of completion, the temporary satisfaction of a job well done. Because in short order, this rest will end, and it will be time for that seventh circle of hell known as editing. No good thing lasts forever—there is always more to do, more to accomplish, more to create.

It is good to celebrate the doldrums, the brief pauses in between the sprints that is writing a book. If you find yourself tired at the end of your latest writing pass, feeling like you’re struggling to catch your breath, that’s good. It means you ran hard. You have a right to be tired.

This is challenging work. It should beat the shit out of you. That's how you know you went for it, that you didn’t hold anything back. Try to be proud of your effort. You could have made it easy; instead, you aspired towards something better.

And just remember that you could have done what most people do, which is write nothing at all. To be mediocre is not the status quo; to be silent is. Attempting anything creative at all is always the exception, the stuff of heroes.

Look at the world and see how derivative it is, how unoriginal most things can be. To make something is a special kind of rebellion.

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By now, you likely can see that you didn’t write the best thing ever. You wrote a thing, and you could have written a million others. But you made something, and that is not nothing. You are Percival delivering the grail, Alice returning from Wonderland. Here you are now, returned from heaven.

Most adventures destroy those who attempt them. Survival, after all, is far from guaranteed. So, if you’ve made it back from your artistic quest, if you were not consumed in the process by every monster you encountered, rejoice. You are wiser for it, whether you realize it or not.

What you know now can never be explained. You belong to another world, to the realm of could-be, where only the immortal survive. It makes sense you would have trouble feeling at home in this world, in such a drab and dreary place as this. The best one can do after returning from such a place is to keep busy, to not get too lost in the spaciousness of one’s own mind.

It is good to stay grounded, to keep a schedule, to have something else to work on. Breaks are your friend, but idleness can consume a person. Be careful. Art tends to demand imbalance. You have to be a little unhinged, after all, to turn sunflowers into symphonies and fever dreams into murals.

Life, however, requires balance. You have to eat, have to move your body, have to sleep and socialize and be a creature in this world.

You need both—the humanity and the divinity—to survive as an artist. You have to become acquainted with both agony and ecstasy if you want to keep at this work for a long time. And it’s worth keeping at, if you ask me. Once you have tasted the inner life, an outer existence holds little sway. It lacks the delicious subtlety and depth found in things of the soul.

Personally, I tried almost everything else and found little in this world that could hold a candle to the nutrition one finds in creative pursuit. Maybe you are the same, though it’s probably hard to tell now. So don’t think too much about it.

Take a break, catch your breath, then get back to it. This is but a bend in the road, the latest draft in a whole series of them, another step in a very long journey. The only task that matters now is to sit, rest, and then keep walking.

See you on the trail,

Jeff

P.S. Ice cream helps.