Okay, now Seriously

About Something We Often Forget

Most of the trouble we have with writing anything is temporary--truly. We have to try always to keep this in mind. And that can be accomplished if you can manage to keep yourself thinking only in terms of this one day’s work, while holding back anything other than the determination to stay there the appointed amount of time each day, and struggle with it.

As I’ve said many times, most everything ever written was written a little at a time, over time, in a lot of confusion and doubt. It’s the territory. Quite normal and all good. If you’re spending the time, confused or no, happy or no, it is all going very well indeed, even when it feels like failure.

And, when it does feel like failure, as may—as quite probably will—very often happen, try to keep uppermost in your mind the fact that you absolutely cannot ruin it, or harm it, or fuck it up in any permanent way. At your lowest ebb, in your most sleepy, inattentive, dull, incompetent state, the worst thing you can do to it is render it necessary for you to do it again. The whole thing is tied up in failure, and so we work in that knowledge trying, as none other than James Joyce himself put it, to fail better.