"You are working on a first draft and small wonder you’re unhappy. If you
lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you
are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel
sure that you will never make it and were not cut out to do this, if
your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must
be a writer. If you say you see things differently and describe your
efforts positively, if you tell people that you “just love to write,”
you may be delusional. How could anyone ever know that something is good
before it exists? And unless you can identify what is not
succeeding—unless you can see those dark clunky spots that are giving
you such a low opinion of your prose as it develops—how are you going to
be able to tone it up and make it work?"
--John McPhee
