This passage is an exact description of the trouble I underwent in my twenties, when I was trying so hard to be a fiction writer.


from "My Vocation" by Natalia Ginzburg

Writing poetry was easy. I was very pleased with my poems, to me they seemed almost perfect. I could not see what difference there was between them and real, published poems by real poets. I could not see why when I gave them to my brothers to read they laughed and said I would have done better to study Greek. I thought that perhaps my brothers didn't know that much about poetry. . . . I was not happy, I was always extremely afraid and filled with feelings of guilt and confusion. . . . For quite a while I thought it was all worth it because my poems were so beautiful, but at a certain moment I began to think that perhaps they were not so beautiful and it became tedious for me to write them and take the trouble to find subjects; it seemed to me that I had already dealt with every possible subject, and used all the possible words and rhymes. . . . I couldn't find anything else to say. Then a very nasty period began for me, and I spent the afternoons playing about with words that no longer gave me any pleasure. . . . It never occurred to me that I had mistaken my vocation--I wanted to write as much as ever, it was just that I could not understand why my days had suddenly become so barren and empty of words.

[translated from the Italian by Dick Davis]