Letter to a Broken Friend
So you have come to do the day when you want to quit, when there is nothing to look forward to, when you wonder why anyone ever thought they could produce anything that mattered to anyone else.
You find yourself at home, burning everything you ever wrote, reformatting your computer’s hard drive and wishing your could reformat your own, telling every friend or acquaintance who will listen to you that you are done, finished, finito, kaputt. You can’t write another word. You can’t look at another book. You don’t care anymore. You wish that you had never started this stupid dream to become a great writer. You will ask them to remind you that you’re nothing, that you can’t do this, that you’re better off working at Starbucks and living like a normal person.
And the people who love you will say, OK in a bewildered tone.
But the people who have been there will say, Yes, I hear you.
We do hear you. I won’t say we’ve all been there. Some people have faced more rejection than others. Some writers never get even a fraction of what their work deserves. Some think that a handful of rejection letters or bad reviews was all they ever got and that hard work and picking yourself up by the bootstraps was what got them through. But don’t listen to them. Listen to the people who cry a little with you, and pick you up and help brush you off, and say they’re sorry.
You don’t have to try again. Maybe you will be better off if you don’t. I’m not going to tell you you have to. People leave the business. People are happy without being writers and that’s OK. You can be done if you want.
But if that hidden, wounded part of you wants to come back someday and play again in a safe place, come write near me. I’ll keep from looking over your shoulder until you’re ready. I will keep people away from you and your newborn, stumbling steps toward trying again. I’ll put an arm around you when you say you don’t think you’re ready and you don’t think this is a good idea, and you retreat for a little while again. I will tell you how much I love what you have done before and how anxiously I am awaiting what you will do again. I will miss all the great words you will never write.
There are words only you can put together, and books only you can write. They are waiting within you, under the rubble. I see bits and pieces of them gleaming. It is a lot of work to uncover them. I can only help you tangentially, encouraging you on, but the work is yours to do, I’m afraid.
The world doesn’t know what it is missing, but I do.
