This is what writing is like.

This is what writing is like.

Emily Brontë, age 21, in the margins beneath a new poem:

“I am more terrifically and infernally and idiotically and brutally STUPID—than ever I was in the whole course of my incarnate existence. The above precious lines are the fruits of one hour’s most agonizing labor between ½ past 6 and ½ past 7 in the evening of July – 1836.”

There’s also this, from Flannery O’Connor:

“Writing a novel is a terrible experience, during which the hair often falls out and the teeth decay.”

Hang in there, writers. Better luck today.