Sure, we know that writing is hard.
And that, the writing life is more beautiful in theory than in reality.
But I think we forget how painful writing can actually be.
Physically painful, sometimes.
You look at your work, and you know it’s terrible.
It is deformed, not growing correctly, and sick with a literary version of the flu.
So you go back in and give it another few hours of your life.
It’s all there is.
The only alternative is a world where you don’t write.
And you can’t not write.
You can’t not create.
And who knows, after 10 or 20 years, you might not be so bad at this thing.
“I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as with a dying friend. During visiting hours, I enter its room with dread and sympathy for its many disorders. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.”
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life
