Daily Inspiration Quote by Nicholas Mosley

Self-disgust, in Mosley’s hands, isn’t false modesty; it’s a craft principle. “It always strikes me” frames the reaction as recurring and involuntary, like he’s repeatedly ambushed by his own juvenilia. The adverbs do the real work: “almost unbelievably bad” isn’t a measured critique but a shocked recoil, the kind you feel when you discover an old notebook and can’t believe you once thought the sentences were finished. For a novelist, that’s not merely embarrassment. It’s evidence that your taste has outpaced your past technique.

The line smuggles in a quiet argument about how writing improves. Beginners tend to assume early drafts are rough in the cosmetic sense: a little polishing, a little trimming. Mosley implies something harsher: early versions can be structurally wrongheaded, morally shallow, or simply blind to what the material actually is. He’s describing the gap between intention and execution, the period when you’re still learning what your book wants from you.

Context matters, too. Mosley’s career sits in a postwar British tradition suspicious of neatness and certainty, attuned to the ways narrative can lie by simplifying. Admitting the “unbelievably bad” draft is also a refusal of the romantic myth that novels arrive fully formed. The subtext is liberating and brutal: the only way to write better is to produce work that, later on, you won’t be able to read without wincing. That wince is the proof you’re still growing.