“Part of the writer's problem may be thee wrong kind of appreciation: hen he does work he knows to be less than he's capable of, his friends praise precisely those things he knows to be weak or meretricious. The writer who cannot write because nothing he writes is good enough, by his own standards, and because no one around him seems to share his standards, is in a special sort of bind:
the love of good fiction that gets him started in the first place makes him scornful of the flawed writing he does (nearly all first-draft writing is flawed) and his sense that nobody cares about truly good fiction robs him of motivation.”