I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how doing anything worthwhile is (usually) hard work.

Like writing, renovations on a new (old) house, being married, raising tiny humans, the art of making good sourdough bread and the list goes on and on and on.

I’m going to focus on writing (but I think this analogy works for all the above and many more).

In the beginning – I’m all-in! – super pumped – can’t stop fantasising about the idea – excited!

Ideas flow out of me as if they are poured into my brain by tiny idea fairies with watering cans.

I don’t want to go to bed at night.

I can’t stop thinking about my wonderful ideas.

I wrap them around me like a metaphorical fur coat of armour. I’ll take any opportunity to buy into the idea of myself as a modern-day Zelda Fitzgerald.

Then the real work begins and the euphoric starting energy starts to wane.

Things get hard.

There’s this mismatch between the art (and artisan sourdough bread) I consume and the art I create.

I get disheartened.

This process that I go through regularly, reminds me of a quote by Ira Glass, who refers to this as the taste gap:

“All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years, you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not”.

Ira Glass

George Saunders says a similar thing about his early experience as a writer,

“When I was first reading Hemingway, that was what I was really jealous of – the way a sentence rendered a moment in time. Then, later, I was obsessed with story shape, as realized in a prose narrative. And I mean obsessed – tormented when I couldn’t understand or execute it…tormented as in: pacing around town, self-remonstrating, feeling like an incomplete person because I couldn’t write a sentence that had any of the essential me in it, or a sequence that felt “like a story.”

George Saunders, Story Club

This is not to say that stuff worth doing is completely without joy. There is pleasure in hard work. It’s just not pleasurable all of the time.

Viewed in this way, it’s simply a phase that we must go through when doing hard things. Things that are worthwhile.

Glass goes on to say that while most people quit during this phase you shouldn’t.

In actual fact, you should do the exact opposite.

You should do more work. By doing the work you’ll close the gap. It will take time, but it will happen if you’re consistent.

In a recent interview, writer Emma Jane Unsworth talked about how she knows that during any creative project, there’s going to be a period of self-loathing – a creative dip – and it’s just part of the routine of making art. I love this!

Here’s to embracing self-loathing and continuing anyway.