Rachel Shteir, who calls (NYT) writing “daily frustration, not to mention humiliation,” mulls writers’ failures:

I remember the first time I felt like a bona fide failure as a writer. This feeling of nausea washed over me, but it was confusing because it appeared at the exact moment when I was supposed to be feeling success. It was when I finished my first book and realized there were some things in it that I hated, things that were made all the more hideous to me whenever people said, “You must have such a sense of accomplishment.” I asked a more experienced writer if she ever got over this nauseated feeling. She didn’t reassure me. “Oh, that never goes away.”

Every writer has subjects that are our “Moby-Dicks,” the ones we imagine will transform us, more than the others, catapulting us to some other more pleasant climate.

Instead, they sink us. Help, help, we cry, as we drift out to sea on a leaky lifeboat. Doomed.