Do you write? Then you will agree.

You plan to begin writing at a particular time on a particular day.

You wake up, brush your teeth, take a bath. You wear fresh clothes and comb your hair. You have your breakfast. You are ready.

Nothing else to do. You made a commitment. You had a resolution. Before you sit down, you feel like doing something else. Anything else. Like reading advice on how to write.

You feel like not writing. You feel like you can’t write. Ideas stop occurring. Thoughts stop happening. The mind goes blank.

But you are not just any writer. You are an aspiring writer. That too a sincere one.

You laugh at your mind’s tricks. You smile at your self-doubts. You do this well because you do this every day.

When the time strikes, you sit down and begin.

They say by this point the battle is half won. But the other half is demanding too.

You are already tired. It’s your third bad day in a row. You thought today will be different. The previous two days, you pushed through 2000 words of shitty writing. But now, every word is an effort. Did the world just slow down? Or are you writing really slowly?

O dear writer warrior! Keep fighting, this is just the beginning.

This is just one of the many days you will feel like you chose the wrong career. Expect massive bouts of self-doubt. Expect thick layers of writer’s block. Expect burning sensations in your eyes as they turn red through hours of staring at the screen.

Welcome to the jungle. Take out your machete and keep cutting through the wild grass. You won’t get highways here. You will need to clear your every step of the way.

Once in a while, you will have a breakthrough. You will write something worth reading. The rest of the time, it might just be black marks on white screens. Making sense grammatically but not worth looking at and being processed by the brains of innocent readers.

It’s not your fault.

It’s how things work.

Keep on keeping on.