Here’s something nobody tells you before you start writing:

you’re going to hate everything you write at least once.

Sometimes twice.

Sometimes constantly.

It’s not a flaw,  it’s the default setting.

You read someone else’s book and think, “Wow, this is brilliant.”

You read your own and think, “Who allowed this? Did a raccoon get into my keyboard?”

This is because your brain is a jerk.

It knows what you meant to write. The epic, flawless version of the scene that played like a movie in your head.

Then you sit down to type it, and what comes out looks like it was translated from English to German to Morse code and back to English by someone who’s never met you.

And the worst part?

Readers will tell you, “This part was so powerful,” and you’ll smile while thinking, “Really? THAT paragraph? The one I wrote at 2 a.m. while eating stale cereal and questioning my entire existence?”

Here’s the truth:

You hate your writing because you’ve seen the behind-the-scenes.

You watched yourself struggle for every sentence.

Meanwhile, everyone else only sees the finished product, not the 47 deleted versions or the moment you laid face-down on the carpet rethinking your life choices.

So don’t trust your brain on this.

It’s not a reliable critic.

It’s the same voice that once convinced you your past bad decisions were a good idea.

Writers hate their own work because they’re too close to it.

Readers love it because they aren’t.

And somewhere between those two realities is the actual truth:

Your writing is better than you think,

you’re tougher than you realize,

and the part you almost deleted is probably the part someone else needed.