Bad writing. It piles up. You write and you write and you just add to the pile. It's shit, it's shit. You torture yourself. For what reason? It's terrible, it's shit. You're convinced. Utterly convinced.
Then suddenly. It sucks less. Just marginal improvements at first. And while the pile of writing builds, you come to find that eventually, you've reached its peak. Your peak. The stuff you're writing is actually decent. No wait, it's good. It's better. It's f*cking great!
Today I climbed a mountain again -- I looked through all of my electronic files. I skimmed dozens of pages of fiction, some of it passable, some of it maybe even good. A lot of it was bad. Really bad. Like, how-could-I-ever-have-thought-this-was-good bad.
But there, amidst the bad, and the okay, there were gems.
And then, later, I was paging through my last Writer's Notebook (#7) and found the following quote I'd copied from the January/February 2011 issue of Poets & Writers magazine:
"No writer worth her salt needs to be reminded that underneath nearly every successful piece of writing there is a veritable mountain of 'failure' upon which it stands. The writer--oh, how well she knows. After all, by what other means has her poem, story, essay, or chapter arrived on the page than by fits and starts, addition and subtraction, revision and rewriting?...The act of creating something meaningful is rarely easy. Rather than get discouraged, consider each derelict passage--the mishanded metaphor, the broken logic--as another step further along in that hard slog toward a good, solid piece of writing."
Those words were written by Editor Kevin Larimer, and they really struck a chord, then and now.
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