The Stories Writers Tell Themselves
Aug 13, 2026 · 5 min · 7 segments
**Episode 8 - I'm tired of trying** Writers spend a lot of time making up stories and not all of them end up in our books. *The Stories Writers Tell Themselves* is a free limited audio series about…
Katherine ColletteHostThe story in this episode tends to appear when you're a little further down the path.
It sounds like this: "I'm sick of trying," or sometimes, "Maybe this just isn't worth it anymore." This story is one that tends to appear after a long stretch of effort.
Maybe you've published books, but the experience didn't unfold the way you'd imagined.
The next deal did not appear, the audience did not grow, and momentum didn't build.
Maybe you've started another project and found yourself wondering, "Why am I doing this again?" Because writing has a way of asking for a lot of energy over a long period of time.
There are years of drafts, years of submissions sometimes, and years and years of learning the craft.
Sometimes the response from the outside world is slower or quieter than you expected.
Maybe this is just how it goes forever." Underneath these thoughts and ideas is something fairly simple: effort fatigue.
Writing can involve thousands of hours of work while producing very little visible proof that it's leading anywhere, and that's often the moment this feeling begins to take hold, because what you want is proof.
This is the theme that shows up across many of the stories in this series.
Writers want certainty that the work they're doing will eventually pay off, but writing rarely offers that kind of reassurance.
The story in this episode tends to appear when you're a little further down the path.
It sounds like this: "I'm sick of trying," or sometimes, "Maybe this just isn't worth it anymore." This story is one that tends to appear after a long stretch of effort.
Maybe you've published books, but the experience didn't unfold the way you'd imagined.
The next deal did not appear, the audience did not grow, and momentum didn't build.
Maybe you've started another project and found yourself wondering, "Why am I doing this again?" Because writing has a way of asking for a lot of energy over a long period of time.
There are years of drafts, years of submissions sometimes, and years and years of learning the craft.
Sometimes the response from the outside world is slower or quieter than you expected.
Maybe this is just how it goes forever." Underneath these thoughts and ideas is something fairly simple: effort fatigue.
Writing can involve thousands of hours of work while producing very little visible proof that it's leading anywhere, and that's often the moment this feeling begins to take hold, because what you want is proof.
This is the theme that shows up across many of the stories in this series.
Writers want certainty that the work they're doing will eventually pay off, but writing rarely offers that kind of reassurance.
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