How to Keep Writing When You Hate Everything You’ve Written

Every good writer goes through their cringe era.

Photo by Zachary Kadolph on Unsplash

Sometimes, the only thing worth loving about a draft is the delete key. Years ago, I wrote The Bad Book™. It was a story about growing up in gritty 1980s Brooklyn — territory I’d already covered in my first book — with the lyrical style and voice of my second. The book was a hard middle finger to everyone who told me to play it safe. Write simple stories. Write a book where nobody dies.

In The Bad Book™ everybody died. And the lyrical writing I was so proud of? It bordered on caricature. I loved the book for a sum total of five minutes and hated it for the next eight years. It was the kind of book worth shredding, and the only reason I didn’t torch it is because my lease forbids arson.

It got to a point where I doubted myself as a writer. How can you be so good when you’ve written something so bad?

But I’m here to tell you if you’re ready to hurl your laptop into the sea — or are tempted to elope with the delete key — congrats. You’re leveling up.

I know what it’s like to covet another writer’s talent. To envy the way they tell stories. To ache for the characters and images they create. When I first read Zadie Smith in my twenties, I thought: I’ll never to be able to write like her. Here I am trying to find my voice while she’s publishing acclaimed novels at nineteen. Early on, I identified the gap between skill and taste. Where I was as a young writer versus where I thought I should be — not realizing distance and desire don’t often travel on the same plane.

A surgeon doesn’t mend hearts with precision once they’ve held a scalpel. You wouldn’t want them operating on you their first day, right? We learn by beginning. Time makes us good. Practice makes us great. But even the best fumble and fail forward. Great writers write bad books because skill doesn’t have an end point or an expiry date. We’re students on a spectrum. Always learning. Challenging ourselves. Refining our craft. And cringe writing — whether it’s our first or final drafts — is part of that process.

Anne Lamott in Bird by Bird notes: “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something — anything — down on paper.”

It’s easy to compare your first raw drafts to another’s polished work. Consider that they’ve been at this for decades when you’ve only started. Maybe they’ve worked on this essay for months — years — while social media insists you’re washed up if you don’t go viral by Thursday. Or maybe some writers are winners out of the gate while your journey takes longer.

You wonder — why can’t I write like that? When the real question should be how can I write more like me? It’s easy to hate your work but it’s harder to start writing. To court your work. To slowly fall in love with it. To navigate the ugly, messy bits that are part and parcel to a great love — even on the days you’re tempted to take it to divorce court.

Hating your work is part of the process —it’s you recognizing where you are as a writer and where you could go if you worked at it. It’s identifying your flaws and gaps and demanding better. And it’s you developing a richer palette, especially if you’re an avid reader. As a young writer, I craved the great I saw in the world and the work wasn’t how do I become Zadie Smith, it’s how do I become the best Felicia Sullivan. And I did it (and still do) by reading, writing, and revising. And giving myself grace when I flail in the process.

Case in point — The Bad Book™. While the bulk of it was worth shredding, there was one salvageable story. “The Summer Judy Fell Out of a Window and My Hair Turned White” took place in 1987, before my family packed up and fled eviction to Long Island. It’s a story I kept revisiting because I saw its potential. And it gnawed at me. Eight years ago, the essay wasn’t ready for primetime. While it was technically good writing, it wasn’t as powerful as it could be because I didn’t have the emotional maturity and perspective to finish the final draft.

And that realization wasn’t an indictment on whether or not I was a good writer — it was merely a step in my journey. Sometimes, you’re not going to know what the flaws and gaps are — you might only see the morsel worth saving. So stay with it. Write up, down, around, and through it. Veer off course. Embark on different storylines. Practice and play. Because there is no one formula or tidy solution. Writing is work. In time, the flaws will reveal themselves and you’ll resolve them, one by one. And the story you’re meant to tell will emerge.

Anne Enright, in a 2013 Guardian feature on failure, perfectly encapsulates the wreck and ruin of falling short as a writer but the beauty in the consistent act of showing up. And how that beauty can subsume all the failure that comes before and after it:

Failure is easy. I do it every day, I have been doing it for years. I have thrown out more sentences than I ever kept, I have dumped months of work, I have wasted whole years writing the wrong things for the wrong people. Even when I am pointed the right way and productive and finally published, I am not satisfied by the results. This is not an affectation, failure is what writers do. It is built in.

Your immeasurable ambition is eked out through the many thousand individual words of your novel, each one of them written and rewritten several times, and this requires you to hold your nerve for a very long period of time — or forget about holding your nerve, forget about the wide world and all that anxiety and just do it, one word after the other.

And then redo it, so it reads better. The writer’s great and sustaining love is for the language they work with every day. It may not be what gets us to the desk but it is what keeps us there and, after 20 or 30 years, this love yields habit and pleasure and necessity.

Real talk: you’re writing stories — not scripture. Legions won’t die and the world won’t collapse because you want to hit delete on every story you’ve ever written. I’ve been at this for decades. I’ve had short stories, essays, and books published. Sometimes my work makes me want to cower in corners. Still.

And that’s okay.

Here’s what I do crawl out of the I’m a shoddy writer corner:

• Lower the Stakes → I remind myself that while art matters and it heals I’m not an ER doctor. Nobody dies if I fumble a draft. This one story doesn’t define me as a writer. It’s just a story. And some are worth revising while others need to be discarded.

• Set a Finish Line → You can only edit what exists. Bad pages are better than no pages. Even when you’re tempted to torch every single one of them. Joyce Carol Oates on first pages: “Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”

• Step Away From The Page → Distance delivers clarity. When you’ve written something, it’s fresh, new. You’re tethered to it. But when you’ve allowed the page to cool you can revisit it with less emotion and be able to butcher your way through revisions.

• Find One Sentence Worth Keeping → There’s always a line, a paragraph worth saving. Define what works about it. How it rises above everything that surrounds it. Salvage as anchor for revision or a completely new story.

• Burn Ritual (Optional) → Sometimes you will delete whole sections or entire drafts, and that’s perfectly fine. But carry that hot mess to the finish line. Allow yourself the discomfort of writing bad pages, become accustomed to it. Because you can’t get to a better place in your writing if you can’t endure the rough spaces.

Hating your work isn’t proof you’re failing, it’s proof you care about the stories you want to put out into the world. The goal isn’t to love every draft — it’s to finish it. Love will come later.