Recently, I joined Twitter. Always a bookworm, even with the 240-character reading material, I stocked my feed with my favorite authors and looked forward to scrolling through this little literary corner of social media.

Mostly, I’ve been encouraged by the number of keyboard-smash frustration tweets I’ve seen from the people I consider masters of writing—often followed by a flurry of retweets and replies from fellow writing rockstars, all of them bemoaning the messiness of their craft.

Authors of multiple consecutive New York Times bestsellers, recent winners of prestigious literary prizes, next season’s hottest debut writers, and my treasured favorites alike regularly tweet about how impossible it is to navigate through a story the first time around. Sometimes they curse sentences. Or else they simply ask for virtual hugs while they wrestle with their uncooperative imaginations.

It’s a valuable—if somewhat disheartening—reminder that every single person trying to make art with words, even if they have found major success doing so in the past, struggles.

We all know that first drafts—of novels and essays, poems and memos—are supposed to be bad. Logically, if not emotionally, we accept that nothing polished and published appears equally radiant the first time it is written on a page.

Still, we celebrate finished projects, not the tangled origins that got them there. And it’s easy to forget that absolutely anything available for the world at large to consume and praise is far removed from a first attempt.

Take tweets, for example. As I read through these threads of wisdom posted by professional authors, I envy their ability to turn a phrase so successfully within even the restrictive format of this platform—and even more awe-inspiring, their ability to capture exactly what I feel as effectively in a handful of tweets as in a full novel.

It must be natural skill, I think, ignoring my own routine of reading and revising my tweets—sent out to a vast audience of seven—a dozen times before posting them. How many more times must these authors with platforms of tens or hundreds of thousands tweak everything they post—even when what they post has fewer characters than this paragraph?

Rest assured these people do have impressive natural skills. But even tweets benefit from a critical eye and a second try—and tweets are an innocuous form of writing consumed in seconds by detached scrollers.

If I have to put so much deliberate effort into honing one casual sentence, shouldn’t I expect all that and more when writing an article? An essay? A novel?

I think this awareness starts with recognizing that all art is manufactured. That commercial that made you laugh out loud, that painting you studied for a semester, that movie that just took home an Oscar or two, that song you always listen to when you’re sad, and yes, that book you loved more than your sleep schedule, were all the result of a process.

Nothing spills fully-formed from the fingertips of its creator. Including tweets, Facebook rants, and selfies, if you include more modern forms of self-expression under that umbrella. (I do.)

There is a hidden mountain of drafts, attempts, failures, and frustrations behind almost everything we do. And when it comes to art, no creation is possible without first braving that mountain.

So this is your regular reminder that failure—and by extension, self-doubt—is not a temporary nuisance. (Sorry.) You can’t escape it with time or experience, and you can’t ward against it with past success. You can’t outsmart it, and you can’t get an exemption for being talented.

Failure is inevitable in our line of work. It’s not a setback in the creative process, it is the creative process.

And really, it’s just the first step toward being the kind of artist people like me adore on Twitter.