Learning to Love Your Work

Learning to love your own work--it's a struggle for a lot of writers I know. You get a burst of first-draft energy, blast out a few pages, print them and walk away smiling. And then after the celebratory beer, or a restful night of sleep, you go back and look at what you've written, and you question what the f@#* you were thinking. The prose seems lifeless, or cliché, or confusing. Characters who were so alive in your mind are inert on the page. The euphoria of composition flattens out...