Writing is a terrible way to live your life. It’s frustrating, it pays poorly, and 90% of your efforts will be what literary scientists call “utter shit.” Those are facts.
Most writers start to figure this out when they begin to listen to the advice they get, most notably the whole “write every day” mantra. We’ve discussed the dubious value of this advice before, but in general there’s value to working on your craft on a regular basis, of course. The problem with writing every day is that you become very painfully aware of how often your writing is flat-out terrible.
Look at it this way: If you only write when you’re fired up with inspiration and energy, it will seem easy and be quite fun. All writers know that magical moment when the stars align and you have a great idea burning through you and the time and energy to work on it. The problem, of course, is that if you spend your life waiting for those magical moments you’ll die with just a small handful of short works completed, because those moments don’t happen often. You have to find a way to work consistently in order to produce work on a reliable basis, and that means you’ll discover just how often your work is confused, poorly-written, and dull.
That’s fine. It’s good for you.
Bitter Pill
It’s easy to imagine that other writers are effortless geniuses. They can dash off a brilliant novel over lunch, they can summon a perfect bon mot in any situation, their sentences are minty fresh in the first draft. This is almost certainly not true; all writers have to work at it.
Seeing your own crappy writing on a regular basis is how you learn to do better. It’s that simple. In the rush of delirious creativity you often overlook clunky sentences, logical fallacies, and overuse of clichés because you’re riding high on that creative energy, sort of the way a drunk driver ignores stop signs, traffic lights, and human beings in the cross walk. You’ll learn a lot about writing simply by reviewing your own daily work and realizing that it’s absolutely terrible, then figuring out why it’s terrible.
Trust me when I say that all writers create terrible prose, all the time. The key is learning to a) recognize your terrible prose and b) how to fix, replace, or otherwise mitigate it. Embrace your bad writing.
Of course, sometimes a writer can actually sell bad writing. Not that I would know anything about this. Look, over there! A unicorn! <throws smoke bomb, runs away>