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There’s a great artist called Bobby Fingers whose YouTube channel documents him making insanely detailed sculptures of celebrities , taking the viewer on a journey through his creative process as he does so. In one of his videos—where he’s taken it upon himself to make an enormous fiberglass rowing boat in the shape of Jeff Bezos’ face, because reasons—he says: “This took quite some time, but I’m not gonna complain, because nobody asked me to do any of this.”

Any value or meaning your creative work will ever have begins with your determination to actually do it . Nobody wants it, nobody asked for it, and along the way, you’ll have to constantly convince yourself that what you’re doing matters, because that’s the first step on the road to it actually, really existing, and mattering, out there in reality, the most unforgiving arena of all.

This situation—being tasked, by yourself, with bringing into existence something no one wants, but which has to matter to other people, but which you’ll only ever know matters if you finish it, but which you haven’t started, because it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t exist—is both an utterly intolerable and absolutely unavoidable part of the process.

Unsurprisingly, writers have developed a myriad of strategies and tricks to push through this awkward stage.

My own trick is very simple. When I begin writing something new, I break out a clean, spotless notebook, and announce, to myself, that this is where the book will take shape.

The fucking-up of the notebook, I have found, is absolutely vital. In order to write a book, it’s very helpful for me to maintain this parallel continuum, a Dr Jekyll-space of the subconscious, where the only mistake one can make is to leave a page blank. This contract then frees me, within the pages of the notebook, to do anything—to write or draw, or paint, to whine and complain, to plot and scheme—to fail or succeed without fear.

Within days, I start to see what works and what doesn’t. At some point, a restrained, respectable version of these heartfelt scrawls will make their way, in a more formal, scrubbed-up version, into a finished novel, but this cauldron of ideas is where they are born, and where they must fight for their existence or die.