I Wrote It, But I Hate It

Hating the writing I produce: this is one of my biggest stumbling blocks. I’ve only now come to understand that this is a common process with writers, and that it is as much a problem for others as for myself. In fact, it’s a problem in a lot of subjective and creative endeavors.

A frequent perception of writers is that, as artists, we work on brilliant inspiration, and that our finished creations have descended directly from our fertile unconscious onto paper (or pixels). While this may be true of some, for many of us, writing is work. It’s sitting down in front of the notebook or the typewriter or the computer (believe it or not, some people still use the first two methods!) and churning out words that we hope will reflect our original vision. And at first, when the inspiration is new, we feel excited to be expressing something that has struck us strongly enough to want to transform it into words. For me, that’s the time when things seem to be flowing most directly, to be most connected to my core creativity and inspiration. It’s the time when I feel I am writing something beautiful.

Then the crash comes.

Somewhere, after the first flush of excitement, I realize there is a plot involved, and there is a need of “filler” that doesn’t just bulk out the work but which adds to the characterization, the suspense, the mood. Words that aren’t about the climactic events, but about what stitches those events together. Words that are powerful.

I know an author who does this work in his head, and as a result, tends to write only a single draft. I don’t know if that method keeps him from hitting that stage in the actual writing or not. But I have begun to hear from other authors of my acquaintance, both famous and relatively unknown, that a vast number of them start to hate their works part of the way through. The exact place varies; some start to hate it a third of the way through, some halfway, or at a particular number of words, or so on. But it happens a lot, to an amazingly wide range of writers.

In short stories, it’s a bit different for me; that’s not what I am focusing on here. But in novel writing I personally, hit this point when I have gotten through the first setup of my plot and I know where I’m eventually going. That’s where my spate of ideas suddenly hits the Hoover Dam, and backs up into a stagnant reservoir. I’m fishing around in the waters, trying to find something worth saying, but if I simply went straight to the climax points there would be very little substance to my novel. That “filler” is actually the stitching that holds the entire work together and makes it feel real, instead of like a series of climaxes with exposition between them. That “filler” is where a lot of the story takes place.

When I hit this point, I am certain that what I am writing is terrible. I am sure that it is boring, or repetitious, or just mediocre. I believe that no one will find it particularly interesting. I think I am writing something that simply will not work.

Sometimes, for me, that dislike runs straight on to the end of the novel, and into the revisions. Sometimes it merely lasts until I can reach the point where I know I am headed. At the point I am doing revisions, however, it tends to lift, partially because I am re-reading the whole, and seeing it from the perspective of a reader and not from my writer’s perspective. That doesn’t mean I don’t always have plenty of criticisms, but that I am seeing more holistically rather than getting bogged down in a single piece. Generally, whatever I am writing reads a great deal better when I have been away from it. Interestingly enough, I don’t perceive a great deal of difference between my writing in the parts where I am deeply inspired and the parts where I am working my tail off to find something for my characters to do.

I get the impression that writers with less experience often give up when the hit the place where they start to hate what they’re doing, or believe that can’t do justice to their own story. I think that’s a mistake. There is a lot of discipline in writing, and it’s not always a joy. I’ve seen a lot of people start out wanting to write, and giving up because they simply weren’t able to get to the consistent level they wanted to reach. But consistency is a matter of experience and hard work, and there is no endeavor, creative or otherwise, that doesn’t have a learning curve.

And of course, it’s nice to know I’m not alone.