Failures, rejections, and efforts that don’t take flight are our best teachers—though rarely do we learn anything in the moment from such lessons. We just feel the sting. If we’re lucky, criticism is punctuated with admiration and we receive some kind of insight about how to improve a manuscript, for example, but the days of getting gold stars or patted on the back are over for most of us.

Even being read and receiving helpful feedback becomes increasingly difficult. Unless you have a spouse or close writer friends, it’s nearly impossible—unless you pay for it. And yet, it’s understandable: we all live busy lives. So, if somebody’s willing to do you the honor of giving you notes, do the honorable thing and return the favor or pay it forward and offer to read somebody else’s work.

Otherwise, being a writer means fending for yourself.

You learn to trust your gut and run with it, shooting first and asking questions later as the saying goes. Actually, that’s about the best advice a fellow writer can offer: just write the damn thing (whatever it is, whatever your initial perception is: write it down as fully as possible), then worry about editing.

Stephen King even says to take some time away from a piece before editing, to forget about it and start something else, but to set a reminder or mark your calendar and come back, say, a month later. However, if you’re like me, it’s not that easy. Try as I may, I can’t help myself from in-line editing the shit out of things before I allow myself to move on to the next sentence, even—let alone trying not to edit after completing a draft. Nevertheless, what King is correctly suggesting is that there must be forward motion. There can’t be edits without first a draft, which is to say, we are writers to the extent we are writing.

Most of the time in fact, writing is navigating distractions.

Writing is receiving template rejections, assuming existential dejection, and making excuses not to write. Okay, I’m being hard on myself—on all of us—but somebody has to be or the work won’t get done. Because that’s what writing is: work. Aesthetic vs. Ego vs. Play vs. Time…

So, we work at it.

We still make mistakes. We still write entire stories we’re as passionate about as ever that for some reason end up being utter shite. We still receive rejections. We still have those occasional moments of feverish bliss which remind us why we bother. And after a while, we start to make fewer mistakes.

Those things we did well once upon a time are now brilliant masterstrokes inherent in our work. But the work isn’t over. We must roll up our sleeves and move on to what’s next.

So, what’s next?