Disliking your work takes a toll on any writer.

Imagine you spent days, weeks, months, or even years on a piece of writing. You edited and rewrote. You spent hours trying to get everything just right, but nothing had made it “right.”

What you may have been confident about during the writing process no longer shines. All you see are your shortcomings. “Why should someone publish this? Did I really think it was good at one point?” In short, you’re not a fan of your work anymore.

Many writers have expressed this same sentiment, some even with their best-known and most beloved works they published. But how do you shake off the negativity and move on? How do you get your work out there without experiencing embarrassment afterward? Look below at where this mindset comes from and what to do about it.

What This Belief Does to You

When you look back and feel embarrassed at what you wrote, you don’t see your accomplishments. But how do you keep writing when your mindset descends into negativity every time you write something? How can you call yourself a writer when the work you create doesn’t even meet your own standards, let alone the standards for “good” writing?

There are a few things you can do to combat this. Remember:

1) Someone else will enjoy it. Writing (like all art) is subjective. Not everyone will like your writing, but many will, and they will see your potential. If they get to witness the progress you make, then that’s even better.

2) Constantly looking to the past doesn’t help you. Keeping yourself in the past and focusing on your weaknesses doesn’t let you move forward. If you make a mistake, acknowledge it, then let it go. It happened and you can’t change it. What do you do when you need to move forward? Get back to writing.

 

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How Disliking Your Work Can Become a Good Thing

Disliking your work buys into a mentality that holds you back and gives you self-doubt. But “hating” your work at some time or another can transform into a good thing if you know what to do.

Philip Pullman (author of His Dark Materials) is a great example of this. His first book The Haunted Storm was just that: his first book. Looking back, Pullman described how it wasn’t very good. But he pushed past it and wrote more. He began putting out more books, each one better than the last.

Even if you have cause to dislike your writing, or it’s in your own head, remember to do the following to turn dislike into something good:

1) Recognize your early work as a steppingstone. Writing is like climbing a mountain. The more you write, the more you advance. Your early work acts as one of the many steppingstones you need to take to get to where you need to be. If there’s a misstep along the way, you have a chance to learn from this misstep. You advance further than you would have if you hadn’t made a mistake.

2) Know you are not your work. Even if something you wrote can be improved, that doesn’t automatically make you a terrible writer. It also doesn’t mean that you yourself are someone unworthy to be called a writer. Your work simply has the potential to be better. You created something, which is a big accomplishment. Be sure to separate the two.

What to Do When You “Hate” Your Writing

It might be that you struggle with disliking your work most of your career. But you can learn how to handle it and redirect that negative mindset. What do you do when you start to believe that you dislike your writing?

1) Remember you’re improving. When you begin hating your work, remember writing is a process. No fairy godmother is going to swoop down, wave her magic wand, and make you the next Shakespeare. But that’s not an excuse to just give up. When you develop as a writer, you practice to improve. It can be frustrating when you struggle with a specific weakness in your writing, and it’s especially hard when you never seem to meet your expectations. But improving means you’re heading in the right direction.

2) Analyze your strengths. Don’t just focus on your weaknesses. There’s a difference between recognizing where you can improve and dwelling on mistakes. Examine your past work. What do you like about it when you reread it? What have you learned since then? There are no true writing masters. Every writer struggles with something. Examine what you believe you’re good at and what isn’t quite there yet.

3) Keep moving forward. A great writer needs to start somewhere. That “somewhere” just happens to be a place that’s not a New York Times bestseller, Nobel Prize-winning good. Writing appears bad in comparison to where you will eventually end up. That doesn’t mean everything you’ve wrote yesterday will always be bad. If you focus on the past, you won’t have a future to write for. If you remain stagnant, your writing suffers, and you risk losing the strengths you developed over time.

It’s tempting to give up. Lots of writers did and still do. But writing is a long process. Writers sign up for this when they set out to write. Writing also isn’t something one can completely master. Rather, it’s a growing and changing art that you need to learn as much about as possible. In the end, all you can do is get back to writing.

 

 

E. M. Sherwood Foster is a fiction writer, poet, and graduate student at the University of Cambridge, St. Edmund’s. She is also the creator of the Foster Your Writing blog. Her work has appeared in over twenty literary journals, including Aurora Journal, Sour Cherry Mag, and Paragraph Planet. Her chapbooks have been published by Yavanika Press (2022) and Ghost City Press (2023). You can find more of her articles here.