I know it’s part of the creative process. I have been here many times before. I know it’s going to be uncomfortable. I know the pain. I know to trust in a resolution. I know to keep working and it will get better. I know this is normal. I know everyone goes through this. I know despair is just another of the many representations of self-doubt.

Yet, what if it’s shit?

What if it’s actually, truly, monumentally a shit piece of work I’ve spent all this time on, and there is nothing that’s ever gonna save it, and the best thing I could actually do would be to dump the whole 80,000 word file in the Trash and delete forever?

This is the excruciating thing about creative endeavours. You just never really know whether you are creating something okay, mediocre, really great, or something that will totally humiliate you for the rest of your life.

I guess you can just laugh it off if it happens. But Nora Ephron said it well…

***small interlude while I go searching for the part of the book that has those lines in it. But I realise I must have borrowed it from the library, ’cause it’s not in my bookshelf. Instead, I stumble upon ‘I Feel Bad About My Neck’, and I go on to skim it a bit, and find so much wisdom and tips about writing that I can use in my current project that I feel like I got handed a small pearl of luck. Anyway, I then Google what Nora Ephron wrote about flops and get this, from that book I read called, ‘I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections’:

Flops stay with you in a way that hits never do. They torture you. You toss and turn. You ­replay. You recast. You recut. You ­rewrite. You restage. You run through the what-ifs and the if-onlys. You cast about for blame.

***

By the way, there are people who have positive things to say about flops. They write books about success through failure and the power of ­failure. Failure, they say, is a growth experience; you learn from failure. I wish that were true. It seems to me the main thing you learn from a failure is that it’s entirely possible you will have another failure.

***

My biggest flop was a play I wrote. It got what are known as mixed reviews – which is to say, it got some good reviews, but not in the New York Times.
It puttered along for a couple of months, and then it died. It lost its ­entire investment. It was the best thing I ever wrote, so it was a particularly heartbreaking experience. If I think about it for more than a minute, I start to cry.

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2011/feb/10/nora-ephron-i-remember-nothing

So this is what I fear. My eternal optimism is sometimes based on nothing concrete. What if my work stinks?

And if it does, it will stay with me. All I can do is to keep moving forward and try to write something better the next time.

Which brings me to my final point. If creativity could indeed be thought of as a recipe, to try again is perhaps its most important ingredient.