Perspective is important for a writer. And I’ve discovered I have none. Not really.

Gone are all the illusions that I once held about my writing talent—that it is inviolate and absolute…and as ready to leap to my call as the first gush of water from a turn of the spigot.

Last November I murdered the last shreds of confidence retained from the all accolades heaped upon my youthful and undisciplined brow by all the professors I admired, and later all the employers who appreciated my skill with a report or SEC filing.

Those three weeks in November taught me something I’d never known before: Writing is hard and the words are more likely to kick you in the face and knock out all your teeth then they are to slip elegantly into place on the page.

And it hurts.

If you’re lucky you have a circle of friends (preferably other, better, nicer writers) who will hold your metaphoric hair out of the way of your word vomit, clean you up and send you back into the fray. (Maybe I should use a Rocky boxing simile instead. Shit. Do I even remember if it’s a simile and not an analogy or a metaphor?) See? This is what we do. We second-guess every choice, every sentence, every name for every character we use. (Why do I want to call every MC I write Nick?)

If we can just get through to the other side, to the “The End” we can find release.

That is until we read it through and find that all our painful labor, all those perfected word choices, were wrong and we’re left with a manuscript that stinks like an alley behind a fish market in July.

Perspective. If you’re a mother you already know that labor is a bloody mess and no body (least of all the kid) comes out of it looking and smelling like roses. But given some time, and a little clean up by our stalwart editors, eventually you may change your mind and be pleasantly surprised.

Did I do that? Write that?

And sometimes our critics will remind us that yes, yes we did. And we should be ashamed of ourselves. But mostly it’s just us. We are our own worst critics. As a group we’re always so surprised and delighted when good things come from our writing.

As if it was by chance and not by our combined blood, sweat, and talent.

I admire anyone who can pull up a chair and create a world from words. But I don’t often appreciate it in myself anymore, so I was surprised when I pulled up that story that stomped all over me and tied me in knots. Reading it for the first time since I hit “send” last year was a revelation.

Did I write that?

Yeah. It only took me eight months to regain my perspective.