I bet you thought it was a lot better in the middle of the night. You leapt out of your ikea bed like a kindergartener on Christmas when you thought of that brilliant idea. You could already hear the repetition in your head: the rhythm of it all; the beauty. You must’ve thought the metaphor was simply genius. You thought it was glorious. You thought it was the best thing you’d ever written; maybe it was even better than that one page of perfection you heard two years ago at a poetry slam.

I bet you went to sleep blissful. I bet you were confident that you would one day make it with only a computer keyboard and your mind. You probably even whispered to yourself as your head hit the pillow, “I’m such a good writer,” just before you fell asleep and dreamed of a future where your novels lined the walls of Barnes & Noble. I bet the next morning you read through it twice for mechanics and revision, and then you sent it off to some contest or a magazine or a blog or posted it on fanfiction.net. You pat yourself on the back and lived to write another day.
But I’m certain of this: I bet one day you’ll have dug yourself into a writing ditch, and you won’t have written in a week, and you’ll surf through some of your old stuff until you come across that one piece from oh-so-many months ago. You’ll scoff at yourself, thinking how incredible you must have thought it was in the moment. You’ll pause for a second and consider what a terrible writer you are before you make a list of probable career paths: “toaster-oven manual technical writer, head of staff for Volume XVI of the Encyclopedia Britannica, CEO of Sellout industries, maybe.”

After you’ve sat in the puddle of angst you’ve created, you’ll get up and hear the rhythm of it. And you’ll write a short piece about what an awful writer you are and the struggles of teenage wordsmiths. And you’ll think it’s the best thing you’ve ever written.