It Never Does...

...get easier

Someone told you somewhere, or inadvertently communicated to you sometime, that writing fiction would get easier?

It gets harder, not least because you know more.

And there exists also, for instance, almost inevitably, this particular sort of difficulty: that instead of putting down the first or second line that occurs to you, or the twelfth version in revision—you find yourself thinking of fifteen other versions of the line, each of which have their advantages and disadvantages—but each also allowing into your consideration matters that are far from the real task.

And that is when you start really getting down into the deeps of it: because not quite consciously you begin including those matters, which are really temptations, and have more to do with indulgence and vanity than they do with the story: you want others to know how deeply sympathetic you are to human troubles; you want others to have a sense of the sorrows you carry around like everyone else; you want others to know how much you know; you want others (even this) to see what you can do with English sentences, with your extensive vocabulary and your gift for metaphorical speech.

And you forget for a time (you hope it’s only for a time) that all of this simply must be subordinated to the demands of the story of which you are not even, quite yet, certain.

No, it will not get easier.

Its complications will change away from the ones you had when you were new; and these complications multiply, and exacerbate themselves as you grow.

What you can do about all that, simply, is accept these knots and tangles for what they are, and just go on and do the work. And learn, as you will, to be ruthless about what remains in any story, and to be willing to part with what Faulkner called ‘your darlings’ in service of the actual thing—a story, that is finally, in fact, separate from you.

I use the word simply advisedly, by the way: it is all simple in the way that virtue is simple. And risking the charge of mysticism about it all I’ll say that while virtue is simple it is also, of course, unutterably difficult.

So.

Remember that even when it seems completely closed to you except in terms of these traps and failures, you must learn to accept it as part of your destiny as an artist, and just get on with it, trusting that you are not experiencing anything that everyone else hasn't also experienced. Remember Joseph Conrad, who once said in a letter that he was '“distinctly conscious of the contents of [his] own head, but unable to write a single line.” And having his wife lock him in his studio and then shouting to her, "Let me out. I'm a fraud. I never could do this." And he was working on his twelfth book.