The sketchbook keeps the attempts that a finished picture has learned to conceal.

Finished work hides its own history. What you see hanging on a wall gives no sign of the twenty versions that failed first, and those versions are sitting in a book nobody puts on display. This is why comparing your middle to somebody else’s ending is discouraging: you have the whole record and they have shown you one page. The sketchbook is the honest document, and it is the one that stays private.

Keep your own attempts somewhere you can look back at them. And when someone else’s work seems to have arrived fully formed, assume a stack of discarded versions you were never shown.