sarahneverfails asked:

Hi Neal!

I’ve been writing creatively for about six years now, and by other people’s standards, I’m pretty good at it. I’ve even won a couple awards. However, I hate looking at anything I’ve written that’s more than six months old. Every time, I take a mental red pen to my writing and I feel absolutely humiliated that I showed it to anyone in the first place. If I can see faults in my old work, that must mean I’m improving, but it makes it hard to want to show people new things if I know I’ll just be mortified by them later. Do you have any advice?

neil-gaiman answered:

It’s a thing, yes. 

If it makes you feel better, there comes a point where you aren’t mortified by it any longer because you aren’t the person who made it any longer – in the same way you can look at a painting you did as a kid, when you hadn’t quite figured out how to draw fingers, that would have mortified you six months later, when you’d got fingers down AND discovered that people look better with eyebrows, and just see it as a cool painting you did when you were a kid, and the fingers don’t bother you because that was how you did fingers back then, and actually there’s a freedom to the way you deployed colour that you kind of wish you had now…