Dear Future Me: Encouragement for Writers Who Feel Like Quitting

A pep talk for tired authors everywhere.

Me, probably.

There’s a version of me in 2050 who is still writing.

I assume she has opinions about everything I’m doing wrong now.

By then, my Roomba and Keurig will hopefully have negotiated some kind of peaceful alliance. My spine may be held together by stubbornness and a heating pad that charges via sighs. I have no idea what we’ll be writing on, although I’m choosing to believe somebody will still make a decent pen.

But I like imagining that I’m still doing this.

Not necessarily in some triumphant, bestselling-author montage. I mean the actual work. Sitting somewhere with a story half-built, wondering whether a character is lying to me, whether chapter fourteen needs to exist, and why something that sounded brilliant yesterday now appears to have been written by a raccoon with access to my laptop.

Recently I started wondering what that version of me would think about the things that consume so much energy now: launches, reviews, rankings, unfinished drafts, whatever fresh publishing problem has appeared in my inbox before coffee. I suspect Future Monica would remember some of them. I also suspect she’d be irritated by how much time I spent treating temporary things like permanent verdicts.

That’s the useful part of imagining her.

She already knows whether the book I’m currently worrying over worked. She knows which scenes survived and which ones I eventually cut after defending them for three increasingly embarrassing weeks. She knows whether the idea I’m convinced might be terrible became something worth keeping. She has the advantage of knowing that most of the things currently masquerading as emergencies eventually became anecdotes.

I would like this power now. Instead, present-day me gets uncertainty.

That may be the hardest part of creative work. You rarely know, while you’re making something, whether the effort is leading anywhere. You can spend days solving a problem nobody will ever know existed because the finished version simply works. You can write thousands of words and delete them. You can release something you love and hear almost nothing for a while, which gives the brain ample opportunity to conduct its own deeply unscientific analysis of what the silence means. Usually something cheerful.

I don’t think Future Me would tell me every word mattered. Some words absolutely did not matter. I have deleted entire civilizations from manuscripts without measurable damage to the literary ecosystem.

But the work mattered. There’s a difference.

The seventeen attempts at a scene may not survive, but they can be how I find the eighteenth. A book that doesn’t perform the way I hoped can still teach me something about writing the next one. Even the stretches where I feel as though I’m producing nothing useful are often doing work I can only see later.

This is extremely inconvenient for someone who would prefer measurable quarterly results from her imagination.

I also suspect Future Monica would have little patience for the idea that I’m supposed to know exactly where all of this is going. I barely know where the book is going some days. Expecting a complete strategic map for an entire creative life seems ambitious.

The next honest sentence is usually enough. Then maybe another one. Then water, because at some point my organs will unionize.

There will always be reasons to stop. Some of them will even be good ones. Life gets busy. Books get difficult. Publishing can be absurd. Inspiration, despite its excellent publicist, is unreliable. The part I increasingly trust is much less glamorous: sooner or later, I want to come back.

That’s what I hope is still true in 2050.

I don’t need Future Me to be famous, enlightened, or living in a suspiciously photogenic cottage surrounded by first editions. I hope she still gets excited when an idea arrives at an inconvenient time. I hope she still follows strange questions farther than she intended. I hope she occasionally looks up from something she’s writing and thinks, Well, this got weird.

Most of all, I hope she’s grateful I kept making things instead of spending too much time trying to predict whether they would matter.

She will probably still check the reviews.

Let’s not make her completely fictional.

I’ll see you in the bookstores. Still.

— M