I don’t think I’ve told you this before, hypothetical reader: I can juggle. Not, you know, well, but if you give me three tennis balls I can keep them in the air for a good while, and do various tricks (reverse cascade, tennis, shower) that generally make me drop one quicker. I can do two in one hand; I can even, for brief, glorious moments, do four in two hands. This is the extent of my skill.
If you’re (let’s say) a normal person, you can pick up standard three-ball juggling in a matter of days. If you’re me, and your hand-eye coordination was surgically removed when you were eight months old to be stored in a Coordination Vault for Peter Parker to tap in his final confrontation with Venom, well, it takes…longer. I struggled for weeks to get the hang of it.
It was very frustrating, but not just because of the slowness. I’m a pretty patient guy, and I can handle slowness if I’m expecting it. It was frustrating more because I didn’t get better steadily; I would get better, then worse, then better, then worse again. After weeks of practice, I would have days where I felt like I’d learned nothing at all.
Improvement is not an 80’s movie montage where you start out bad and gradually just get better. Improvement is the f***ing stock market. You know the market overall is going to go up long-term; but in the short term, there are days, weeks, months, years, where you’re just going to nosedive. This is part of the process. Getting better means getting worse.
(Side note: thanks, Congress! Your recent demonstration of this phenomenon was both instructive and timely. You can stop now.)
I’m sure you will be shocked – shocked! – when I tell you that writing is the same way. You’d like for every story you write to be better than the last, each successive sentence a spiraling staircase toward the summit of success (and alliteration). What you get instead is the stock market. For instance, I think the story I wrote three weeks ago – “Scissors With Running” – is better than the two I’ve written since. Is that frustrating? Well, yeah, a little. But it’s part of the game. It’s all part of the game.
Also, one time I went outside in bare feet in winter and juggled snowballs. That doesn’t really fit the metaphor. That just means I have an undiagnosed mental illness. Ha ha! No, but really.
See you tomorrow!
Brian D. Buckley 
I can’t juggle to save my life.
That said, I totally know what you mean. That’s probably the most frustrating thing about writing. When do you know you’ve acquired the secret knowledge of the gods/published authors?!
But even they have bad days. It’s frustrating. But at least we can look forward to the days when our writing is on the ball.
Pun perhaps unconsciously intended.
“But even they have bad days.” Very true. Even John Steinbeck, who won the Nobel Prize, struggled in later life with feelings of literary inadequacy. Nobody’s immune.