That Crushing Feeling of Being Rubbish

I tend to ignore it for a while and then go back at a later date to see if i can repair it with new ideas and inspiration. If it really is that bad you could just cut out the good bits, like phrases and descriptions, and recycle them.

Agree with leaving it for a bit. When you go back you'll probably find that not all of it is as bad as you thought. To boost your morale, go back and have a look at some stuff that you feel really works, or got good reactions, just to prove to yourself that you can do it. I think of the muddled, boring stuff as a heap of bricks; I can choose which of those bricks I use to construct my wonderful, gleaming edifice (yeah, right...) A cup of tea and a jaffa cake also works.

At the moment I prefer the keep writing approach; I think they call it free writing or something like that. At the moment if I run into the sand I just write anything to fill the page and keep going. In my experience that feeling that it's all rubbish often has much more to do with the way I feel than with what the work is actually like. I finished a novel, it took me two years, re-read it and thought it was rubbish; I haven't looked at it since, but I don't really know whether it was an issue of morale or quality. Not to worry: keep writing!

I reckon the trick with this is to avoid thinking of every piece that you write as being the last. By this I mean, don't try to cram everything into each piece you write, and don't judge your abilities by the last thing that you've written. I think of it more like a band working on an album. Each song starts in a skeletal form, it is demoed, added to, subtracted from and evaluated. It's a work in progress right up until the thing goes to be pressed. Some songs don't make it, but bits of them turn up in others, or mutate in the process into something else entirely. The aim is to have a good body of songs, with each song being a good as possible in relation to each other song on the record and then to all of the other songs that there have ever been. If you set out with the idea that every song, or story has to be a masterpiece, and that you'll judge everything by that first demo, you'll just give up. Writing is hard work, and it's a slog. Try, where you can, to stop raising the emotional stakes for yourself while you do it. Every bit of writing you do is a stepping stone on the way to the bits of writing you might do in future. Practice is never a waste of time. Cheers, mark