Struggles for Aspiring Writers

Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash

Being a writer sometimes feels like digging a well, with a spoon.

Especially if your career is in its infancy, and you’re yet to make the much-talked-about first dollar. You’re unmotivated and anxious. You wonder why you didn’t pick something easier to be good at.

You’re not alone. I’ve been there. I’m still there. And there’s a reasonable chance your favorite writer’s favorite writer chills out here from time to time. It’s one of the drawbacks of being a writer.

For fun and inspiration, I’ve outlined some struggles you and I face. Enjoy…

Hitting publish is terrifying

You’ve finally sat down and written that article you’ve been procrastinating on. You poured your heart and soul into it, perfecting it to the best of your ability. There’s just one step: hit publish. Then…nothing.

Your demons start whispering joyless phrases to you:

• You know this article can be much better right?
• Haha, you’re gonna publish another one to the void.
• Do you have to bore people with another of your shitty ideas?

And so on. The voice never stops

At first, you rely on your fragile willpower and keep hitting publish, against all odds. With time you learn to numb yourself to this voice. Then you realize the voice has been feeding on one fear…

Everyone is out to judge and troll you

You’re terrified of hitting publish because you care so much about what people think.

Why shouldn’t you care? You’re not a psychopath. The problem is that caring too much makes being a writer too hard. Writing should be fun, caring too much makes it feel like pushing a train.

This time there’s a different voice:

• Everyone who reads this will wonder which dumb fuck wrote it
• Your mom will read this and will be so embarrassed that she’ll never talk to you again
• And on and on

Logically, you know this fear is irrational, but this sucker has a way of bypassing logic. Still, you carry on. Then you find out something more depressing…

Nobody wants to read your shit

This is ego-shattering.

No one cares. No one is judging you, they’re indifferent. To them, you’re just another dude writing stuff on the internet. You barely exist.

Wow!

So your fear of judgement was based on a lie. It was based on grandiosity. You thought you were special; you’re not after all.

This realization unravels more emotional shit. You get desperate. You’re ready to do anything to get the attention and validation you seek so you resort to using devious tricks. You know them: clickbait titles and his brothers.

This also gets you nowhere. So you decide to answer the big question: “Why doesn’t anyone want to read my stuff?” Then you find out…

You’re a shitty writer

This hits like an atomic bomb.

Your writing is mediocre, and no one wants to read mediocre stuff. So what can you do? Well…you have to improve and make your work great. Easy right?

After a lot of trying to improve you realize reality is ugly. No matter what you do your work is still mediocre. It’s as if the door of mastery has been permanently shut against you, and nothing you do will open it.

This is the hellfire stage! It’s the stage where you spend months scared of writing anything. It’s the stage where you consider quitting and finding a real job, or returning to school, or joining the army—anything that will make you never have to write again.

Here you’re experiencing what the host of American Life, Ira Glass, called the taste gap. I can’t explain it better than him:

Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, and I really wish somebody had told this to me.

All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But it’s like there is this gap. For the first couple years that you’re making stuff, what you’re making isn’t so good. It’s not that great. It’s trying to be good, it has ambition to be good, but it’s not that good.

But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is good enough that you can tell that what you’re making is kind of a disappointment to you. A lot of people never get past that phase. They quit.

So what can you do?

Everybody goes through that.

And if you are just starting out or if you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Do a huge volume of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week or every month you know you’re going to finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you’re going to catch up and close that gap. And the work you’re making will be as good as your ambitions.

I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It takes awhile. It’s gonna take you a while. It’s normal to take a while. You just have to fight your way through that.

— Ira Glass

Understand that the first stage of being remarkable is being mediocre. Mastery comes from doing one thing for an unreasonable amount of time. So don’t quit.

• Keep practicing
• Keep shipping
• Keep facing those difficult emotions
• Keep writing shitty first drafts
• Keep hitting publish
• Keep iterating
• Keep improving

And make sure you enjoy every single part of the process. Make sure you love it.

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