Creativity is not glamorous. Usually, it’s a bit more like trying to shake a wet piece of paper out the bottom of the wastebin. Here are more confessions from and for the put-upon writer. (To all this month’s Camp Nano participants, keep it up!)

• Congratulations, you’re now the family/friend group/local community Writer (TM). You will have to check papers, tutor children, and be asked where you plan to teach English. But don’t worry–you’ll get used to it, along with the blind, generally unwarranted authority it grants you on the subject.
  
  
• I occasionally have to beg help from friends to help interpret my own handwriting. (“But, I don’t read heiroglyphics or cuneiform. How do you expect me to–?”)
  
  
• Everyone is unique, but writers are eccentric. It’s your birthright. Embrace it.
  
  
• I can’t watch any movies featuring struggling artists. They either give me ouch-too-real anxiety or make me cranky and bitter about their gimme happy endings. Movies about Walt Disney are ordeals of the spirit.
  
  
• Many non-believers will visibly doubt your writing career. Your only choice is to get better at writing, come back with a vengeance, and be your own origin story.
  
  
• There is no such thing as a draft you’re perfectly satisfied with, only drafts you have revised so thoroughly and so many times that you have lost the energy to be mortified by them.
  

That last one is really, really true to me. I’ve finally reached the point with That One Part (TM) of “Lost and Found” where I don’t feel anything but clinical fascination when I force others to read it aloud. Contrary to how it sounds, the feeling is actually good. I can tell how much more refined it’s become by version twenty-three. Ah, good writer times. I wish you the best with your own drafting!