Writing has been in my bones since the beginning. My first side hustle was writing and selling comic books in elementary school. In my early teens, I used to steal my mom’s laptop on long road trips to write fiction stories for fun. Point being: I’m no stranger to the world of wordsmithing.
But in the world of producing and publishing books, I’m still an infant. Roughly two years into the practice of dedicating my mornings to the craft—a period which has seen my first book self-published in March of 2022, a second book now in the editing process, and plans for many more in the works—I often find myself discouraged by how little progress I seem to have made and how few books I’ve sold (just under 200 copies of my first book).
At least once a day, the voice of Resistance rises up and says “maybe you should give it up and move on to something else.” A few times it’s come close to nudging me over the edge and convincing me to put the pen down.
But then I realize that, as an acorn is an oak in the early stages of development, I, too, am just in my beginning. And this period of doubt and discouragement I now find myself walking is all part of the process.
The part I’m now in is the part of every endeavor where our initial burst of energy and enthusiasm has worn off and the brutal reality that the road ahead is much longer than we anticipated finally sets in. This is the valley of doubt where many a dream goes to die.
In The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, the senior demon Screwtape counsels his nephew Wormwood, a junior tempter tasked with securing the damnation of a human being known as the “Patient,” to hit hard during this trough:
Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing.
In Atomic Habits, James Clear refers to this period as the Valley of Disappointment. Slogging through its swamps at a slower-than-desired pace, doubt waxes and willpower wanes. Until eventually, the wanderer is so worn down that they decide to give up, adding another set of bones to this graveyard of abandoned dreams.
Understanding this is a feature of every endeavor always helps me put my doubts about my writing in its proper context. It helps me remember the reality that good things take more time than we want them to. It reminds me of the truth of my situation: I’m simply in the stage where my commitment to the craft will be tested. If it means as much to me as I say it does, this period is where I prove it. To write one book and expect success is not only unreasonable and hubris, it is to desire that the universe make exceptions just for me. And put bluntly: that’s just not how things work; I haven’t done enough to make that request.
I hope you, like me, might find encouragement in awareness of the fact that this phase of discouragement comes to every person in every endeavor. I truly believe that knowing this period of mounting doubt awaits us in all our enterprises helps us deal with it when it comes. Because we know that, though we walk through the valley of the shadow of doubt, what awaits if we keep going is the water of life. Instead of wishing for shortcuts and then turning back when we don’t find them, we are prepared to meet this prolonged period with persistence—it is, after all, as Dante illustrated in The Divine Comedy: the path to Paradise runs through Hell.
And what is it that they say? If you’re going through Hell… keep going.
Don’t let your dreams die in darkness.
Ira Glass talks about this: “Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”
Sometimes the space you're afforded without a large audience ("success") is great to explore ideas and write whatever you want. I recently started a Substack on Creativity - only a handful of subscribers ,but I feel free to write without constraint.. stay in the valley a bit longer. All the best!