Letter to a young writer

I recently wrote the letter below to an incredibly talented but unhappy young writer who was doubting his abilities. It occurred to me that it had some general applications so I am reproducing it here, slightly modified:

First of all, you are NOT a bad writer at all; you may be a brilliant one. What you are is first an original, which is never appreciated by any reading establishment. Second, you carry the normal writer’s self-consciousness to an alarming extent, perhaps because you are a perfectionist.

Believe me, there is not a writer on earth or at least any writer who is not a hack writing to formula in the market who has not felt like this, or doesn’t feel like this somewhere in the back of his mind every time he begins or continues a new work. There is not an emotion or feeling of self-criticism you have mentioned that has not been felt by every serious writer.

I have had something of a block the last year to six months caused by perhaps by a combination of lack of response from editors, depression, and the physical symptoms of my undiagnosed Parkinson’s, which makes it difficult to hold a pen or pencil (I usually compose my first drafts that way) and impossible to type without typos in every line.

In some way I realize that these are excuses for myself. The interesting writer Steven Pressfield, author of Gates of Fire, the realistic best seller about Thermopylae, calls this phenomenon “resistance.”

Recently I have started writing again with physical difficulty but not mental. Pressfield has written a little book called The War of Art. It is more a collection of aphorisms than a self-help book which I would despise. I found the first half in particular a brilliant analysis of the roadblocks that we put in our own way as writers. It took my about an hour to read the entire book by the way, and I recommend it highly to any blocked or overly self-critical writer.

You’re a better writer than you think, and somewhere you know this. Keep writing. Think of Pressfield who wrote about four novels before he sold one in his forties; of Conrad, who started writing IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE in his forties; and Annie Proulx who published nothing until her fifties. It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.