In the near decade that I've been actively writing, I've only produced four pieces that don't make me sick at the thought of them. This isn't something that I like to admit. I like to pretend that I love all of my writing, but for the amount that I write, there are a staggering number of disappointments.
I work mainly with novels. I like longer works and I love working a long time on them; I've written a few short stories and poems, but those almost always end in failure. As for my novels, I've completed nine in the last several years and most of them I've come to see as unbearable tragedies.
There is nothing worse than feeling like something that you worked so long on and put so much of yourself into isn't any good. Nothing hurts me more than 50,000 words wasted. People have tried to tell me that those novels that will never see the light of day again were somehow helping me and I was never able to see it.
In 2013, I wrote what must be the worst novel in the world. I never named it, only ever calling it “the novel that shall not be named” if I absolutely had to make reference to it. It was my first massive failure, written the year after my favorite novel that I'd ever worked on. I'd written some crappy ones before, but that one was my big flop. The characters were flat, the plot made no sense, the pacing was off, and it just wasn't a good story. I never even wrote it an ending. It wasn't worth the trouble. After I decided I was done with it, I fell into a depression because I thought I would never be able to come back from something so bad.
When the time came for me to start on my next novel, I was terrified. I didn't think that my idea was good enough and I was afraid that I was going to hate another one of my novels, but my characters didn't let up bothering me, so I wrote like I wasn't afraid and it paid off. When I finished the novel, a little less than a month later, I gave myself a week before I read it. When I completed the read through, I was relieved to find that I actually really liked the book-- enough to write a part two to add onto it. That novel turned into something that I loved and something I was proud of. As did the novel of 2015, my most recent completed work. Since then, I've started work on another series that I'm excited about, but it has taken me a long time to get started. I was always afraid of not having the right words and ruining it. But I've learned that either way, I have to write what needs to be written.
I've written a lot more bad novels than I have good novels, but I've come to be okay with that. Not because the bad novels taught me anything special, but because I remember the good ones so much better than the bad ones. I've realized that if you can write one good thing, you can do it again and again. They won't always be good, but there's always going to be another victory on the horizon. In short, don't let bad writing scare you enough to hold you back from the possibility of good writing.
