The writing may or may not be fully formed inside the writer, but it is not made of words. Pulling it out, writing it out, is to face failure. To borrow one of Jean Paul Sartre’s phrases: ‘Existence precedes essence.‘ The story exists inside the writer, the essence—that is, the nature of the story—is fluid inside the writer, it exists like a dream. When pulled onto the page, it becomes the words and is transformed into something new—a merging of its original existence with its new essence. The resulting story can never be what was first imagined. It is absurd to believe it could, but if writers didn’t persist in believing this, they would quit (or admit to their being masochists). Instead, writers learn to work in graduations of failure.