“You start into it, inflamed by an idea, full of hope, full indeed of confidence … If you are properly modest, you will never write at all, so there had to be
one delicious moment when you have thought of something, know just how you are going to write it, rush for a pencil, and start in an exercise book buoyed up with exaltation. You then get into difficulties, don’t see your way out, and finally manage to accomplish more or less what you first meant to accomplish, though losing confidence all the time. Having finished it, you know that it is absolutely rotten. A couple of months later you wonder whether it may not be all right after all.”
Is there a writer out there who has not felt this way?
That’s Agatha Christie, from An Autobiography, in which she also describes the rejection of her first novel, and says of a writer who encouraged her early on, “I can hardly express the gratitude I feel to him.”
Happy writing in 2012! May the literary gods be kind to you.
Meg
