Inspirational Quotes on Creative Frustration (And Why Most of Them Are Lies)

Every MFA dorm room I have ever been in has contained a specific set of quotes, inkjet-printed on cardstock and Blu-tacked above someone’s desk. “Write drunk, edit sober.” “Bird by bird.” “Do not go gentle into that good night.” “The first draft of anything is shit.” “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” You know the ones. You may, right now, have some version of them taped above your own desk, and if so I’m sorry about what I’m about to do to some of them.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about writing-motivation quotes: a substantial fraction of the most-circulated ones are misattributed, stripped from a context that completely changes their meaning, or simply incorrect about the working life of creative people. The lies are not usually deliberate. They are what happens when a specific sentence, written in a specific moment by a specific person with a specific set of problems, gets severed from all of that and pinned on a Pinterest board with a watercolor background.

I’m going to walk through ten of the most-misused, and tell you what they actually meant when they were written, and then (this is the part nobody does) I’ll say what I think is actually true about working creative frustration. If you want the cleaner compilation of genuinely useful quotes for getting through a creative slump, the existing roundup on this blog has the good-faith version of this genre. This piece is the skeptical version, for people whose creative frustration is not, at this specific moment, going to be fixed by a Hemingway misquote on a throw pillow.

1. The “Write drunk, edit sober.” myth

“Write drunk, edit sober.”

Attributed to Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway never said this. Quote Investigator traced it back to Peter De Vries’s 1964 novel Reuben, Reuben, and even in De Vries the line is from a satirical fictional poet character, meant to be a joke about bad creative advice. Hemingway himself, for the record, was very clear that he never drank while working and generally disapproved of writing drunk. From A Moveable Feast: he writes about not drinking when he was working, and only drinking in the evenings after.

What’s actually true: drinking while writing produces prose that is measurably, verifiably worse, and almost every serious writer who has studied the question, from Hemingway to Stephen King (who has written extensively about his own bad experience writing on substances) agrees. This quote is the single most commonly used bad excuse for working creatives to get drunk on a Tuesday. Stop using it.

2. The “The first draft of anything is shit.” myth

“The first draft of anything is shit.”

Attributed to Ernest Hemingway

Also not Hemingway. No source has ever been found before the 1980s, by which point Hemingway had been dead for twenty years. It may be a distilled misremembering of various writers’ complaints about first drafts, but the specific attribution is fake.

What’s actually true: first drafts are rough. They are not, most of the time, “shit.” Most working writers produce first drafts that contain a substantial fraction of the eventual final text, plus unclear passages that need rewriting. The Hemingway-misquote version of this idea has given a generation of writers permission to produce genuinely shit first drafts and call it a process. Do the work. Try harder on the first draft. It will pay off.

3. The “Kill your darlings.” myth

“Kill your darlings.”

Attributed variously to Faulkner, Chekhov, Stephen King

Actually from William Faulkner’s 1914 essay, where he wrote “In writing, you must kill all your darlings,” or from Arthur Quiller-Couch’s 1914 lecture, where he wrote “Murder your darlings.” Quiller-Couch probably came first. The line is often repeated as if it means “cut your favorite passages,” when the original meaning was narrower; both authors meant cut the parts you personally find clever if they don’t serve the reader, which is different from cutting the parts you love.

What’s actually true: the literal advice is sometimes right and sometimes catastrophically wrong. Cutting your favorite passage because you’ve been told to is a recipe for bland prose. The actual skill is knowing which darlings serve the piece and which ones are ego. No aphorism is going to teach you that. Time and practice are.

4. The “A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.” myth

“A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.”

Thomas Mann

This one is actually Mann, from his 1933 speech. Cited correctly, usually. The problem is not the attribution; it is the way this quote gets used to celebrate suffering as validation. If you find writing harder than other people, the quote implies, you are therefore a writer. The inverse (if writing comes easily, you’re not a real writer) is the unspoken shadow. This has kept a lot of people stuck.

What’s actually true: the difficulty of writing is largely a function of what you’re trying to do with it. Writing something easy (a grocery list) is easy for everyone; writing something hard (a novel, an essay that isn’t full of clichés) is hard for everyone. “Real” writers are not people who find writing uniquely harder; they are people who have signed up for hard projects and stuck with them. The quote turns a logistical reality (you picked a hard task) into a spiritual condition (you are a special kind of person), and the spiritual framing is not useful.

5. The “Bird by bird.” myth

“Bird by bird.”

Anne Lamott

Actually from Lamott, actually cited in her (excellent) book Bird by Bird, which you should read. The quote is real. The problem is that it’s been detached from the book’s much subtler advice and turned into a self-help-ism meaning “just take it one step at a time.” Lamott’s original context is richer; the phrase came from her father helping her brother with a school report on birds, where the brother was overwhelmed by the scope of the project. The quote works in that specific context of child’s-report-overwhelm, and Lamott’s extension of it to writing includes a lot of honest texture about depression, alcoholism, and the specific difficulty of mid-career writers.

What’s actually true: “Bird by bird” as an isolated poster quote is cheap wisdom. Lamott’s book is not cheap wisdom. Read the book. The quote as floating advice is shallow; the context restores it.

6. The “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” myth

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”

Stephen King

Real quote, from On Writing (2000). Actually useful. I have no criticism of this one. It is possibly the single most true piece of practical writing advice ever reduced to a tweet-length. Moving on.

7. The “The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” myth

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.”

Steve Jobs

Real, from Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement address. Catastrophically bad advice for 95% of people who hear it. Jobs was, at the time he said this, one of the richest people in the world, with complete discretion over his work and near-total market leverage. For a person in that position, “love what you do” is a reasonable operating principle. For a person freelancing at $400 a project to pay their rent, “love what you do” is useless; the question is not whether you love the work, it’s whether you can afford to not take the work you don’t love.

What’s actually true: most working creative lives contain a lot of work you don’t love, done in service of the work you do love. The people who have entirely loved-work careers are wealthy, lucky, or lying. Jobs’s quote is a fantasy of the billionaire class applied to people whose finances do not permit the fantasy.

8. The “The artist’s life is frustrating not because the path is arduous, but because he has to choose it.” myth

“The artist’s life is frustrating not because the path is arduous, but because he has to choose it.”

Attributed variously to Picasso, Hemingway, and a half-dozen other dead artists. Unverifiable. Possibly invented. Appears on motivational cards at Barnes & Noble. Meaningless. Skip.

9. The “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” myth

“You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”

Jack London

Almost certainly London’s (cited in his 1913 collection of critical writings, though the specific essay is debated). The quote is useful. It’s one of the more genuine things ever said about working writing. Use it.

What’s actually true: inspiration is a myth as a production driver; the working writers who produce consistent work are people who produce work regardless of how they feel on a given morning. Jack London (who wrote over fifty books before dying at forty, partly of exhaustion) was right.

10. The “Write what you know.” myth

“Write what you know.”

Attributed to Mark Twain

Not Twain. Probably a distillation of a half-dozen nineteenth-century craft manuals. As advice, it’s both useful and actively dangerous: useful because beginners often try to write about things they have no access to and fail; dangerous because it limits the imaginative scope of what fiction can do. Many of the greatest books were written by people writing about what they specifically didn’t know (Tolstoy on war, Flaubert on rural nineteenth-century pharmacy wives, George Saunders on nineteenth-century battlefields, Flannery O’Connor on traveling salesmen).

What’s actually true: write what you are willing to research thoroughly, and write what you bring a specific angle to. The “what you know” frame is too narrow and gets used to police interesting writing. Anne Carson writes about Sappho. She’s not Sappho. The work is extraordinary.

What the quotes actually miss

The problem with writing-motivation quotes is that they are designed to be helpful at the specific five-second moment when you read them, and they are not designed to help with the actual structural conditions of a working writer’s life, which are: unreliable income, long feedback cycles, emotional isolation, high opportunity cost, and the specific difficulty of sustaining attention on a long project over years. None of these problems are fixed by a Hemingway quote, misattributed or not.

What is actually more useful than any motivational quote: a working writer’s community (real, small, high-trust), a sustainable daily practice of modest expectations, a relationship with reading that feeds the work, therapy, sleep, exercise, an income floor that does not depend on the work selling.

If you want aphoristic quotes to live by, I’d replace the poster-quotes with three less-used but more useful ones.

Flaubert in a letter to his lover Louise Colet in 1853: “Be regular and orderly in your life, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” This is the best single piece of writing advice I have ever read, and it is almost never quoted because it doesn’t fit the tortured-artist fantasy. Flaubert was saying; if you want to produce demanding work, build a boring infrastructure to produce it from. Boring infrastructure, violent work. That’s it.

Rilke, in his actual Letters to a Young Poet (not the sanitized Pinterest version): “Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows.” The original letter continues to say that if the answer is “not very deep,” you should probably not try to be a writer. Most Pinterest versions cut the hard part. Keep the hard part.

Mary Oliver from Long Life: “Things take the time they take. Don’t worry.” This one actually holds up. Most creative-frustration quotes are trying to short-circuit time. Oliver’s quote accepts it.

And if you’re ever tempted to put a motivational quote above your desk, the actual advice from this working writer is: don’t. Put a weird drawing up instead. Or a photograph of a real person you love. Or a list of the last three books that made you feel alive. Put anything up there except a quote on cardstock, because the quote will stop working the tenth time you see it, and the weird drawing will keep working forever. That’s the actual job.

Get back to reading the rest of the roundup, which has the useful quotes curated separately. The skeptical pass, I’ve done here. Take the ones that survive. Ignore the ones that don’t.