Reading time: About 3 minutes
Do you feel you’re getting worse at writing? No! It’s an optical illusion brought on by your increasing skills….
Last spring, a client of mine had been writing for about eight months. Every day, or close to it, she logged brief sessions, nothing heroic. She was working on a memoir about her father.
One afternoon she sent me a message saying: “I feel like I’m getting worse, not better. I re-read something I wrote six months ago, and it felt stronger than what I’m writing now.”
I’ve heard a version of this from almost every writer I’ve coached over 25 years. And it’s almost never true. What’s actually happening is something more interesting.
You outgrow your old benchmarks
When my client re-read that earlier piece, she wasn’t reading it with the same eyes she’d had six months ago. She was reading it with sharper ones. The quality of her writing hadn’t changed. Her standards had. And her standards had risen so gradually she hadn’t noticed.
That’s the trap with imperceptible progress. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t send a memo. You just wake up one day expecting more of yourself, and the old work looks thin.
This is, if you stop to think about it, exactly what growth looks like.
Why we’re so bad at seeing it
Our brains are wired to notice change when it’s dramatic. A sprained ankle. A finished manuscript. A promotion. A new car. A remodelled kitchen. We’re good at tracking those. What we’re terrible at is noticing change that happens in small, daily increments, especially in skills that are hard to measure.
Writing is particularly bad for this. You can’t weigh a sentence. You can’t measure a paragraph’s tensile strength. Progress in a craft that lives in nuance and judgment will almost always be invisible while it’s happening.
Also, the better you get at doing something, the more you see what’s still missing. A beginning writer doesn’t know what she doesn’t know, so she feels pretty good about her drafts. An experienced one sees every crack. The more you learn, the more aware you become of the distance still left to travel. This feels, from the inside, like standing still.
It isn’t.
What the research says
Psychologists call this the “valley of despair,” the dip in perceived competence that often follows a period of learning. You learn enough to know what good looks like, but not yet enough to produce it consistently. The gap between your taste and your output feels enormous.
Well, it is enormous. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Ira Glass talked about this better than anyone when he described what he called “the gap” — that painful time when your taste outpaces your ability and the only way through is to keep making work. To keep writing. The gap will close, but only through volume.
Practical ways to track what you can’t feel
Since you can’t trust your feelings to tell you how you’re doing, you need external evidence. Here are four ways to gather it.
- Date your drafts. This sounds obvious. But few people do it. When you put a date at the top of every draft, you create an archive you can actually use for comparison. (Not just vaguely remember.) Six months from now, read today’s work. You will almost certainly be surprised.
- Keep a writing log. Not a journal about your feelings (although it’s fine to do that, too). I’m suggesting a simple log of what you wrote, when and for how long. Over time, patterns emerge. You’ll notice you write better on certain days. You’ll see that your output dips when you’re tired or overscheduled. This is data. Use it.
- Save your drafts, all of them. Writers who delete early drafts lose evidence of their own progress. That rough, embarrassing first version you want to bury? Keep it. It’s proof of where you started and how far you’ve come.
- Read old work out loud. Not to judge it harshly. To hear how your voice has changed. Reading aloud forces you to slow down and actually listen. You’ll catch things you’d miss on the page.
The thing about small daily progress
I always ask my clients to write in brief stints. Fifteen minutes, sometimes less. Not because I’m trying to make writing easier, though I am. Because small daily actions are the only way to build a skill that compounds over time.
This is why a writer who puts in 15 minutes every day will, over a year, outpace someone who writes in long, exhausting bursts and then stops for weeks. The daily writer is collecting invisible progress every single time they sit down.
You won’t feel it happening. You’ll feel frustrated and stuck. And then one day you’ll read something you wrote a year ago, and the distance will be obvious.
That gap you feel between where you are and where you want to be? It means your taste is ahead of your current work. That’s not a problem. That’s the whole deal.
Keep writing.
Something I’m loving right now…
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Have you ever thought you were getting worse at writing? We can all learn from each other, so please, share your thoughts with my readers and me in the comments section, below. If you comment on today’s post (or any others) by June 30/26, I’ll put you in a draw for a digital copy of my first book, 8 1/2 Steps to Writing Faster, Better. To enter, please scroll down to the comments, directly underneath the related posts links, below. You don’t have to join Disqus to post! Read my tutorial to learn how to post as a guest. (It’s easy!)
