I Hate Writing

When it’s time to write, there will be days that you don’t feel like typing. But stepping up when it’s annoying or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.

This might sound harsh, but it’s the truth. You’d better be writing because you can’t not write. You’d better love it. (Otherwise, quit now.) But if you do love it, I mean really love it, the world needs you far more than you know. We are waiting for your words. Longing to be changed. We need your art—whether you realize it or not. Will you share i

So the point is to take the work seriously but you don’t take yourself too seriously. There’s a riff about this in Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he talks about how amateurs are too precious with their work: “The professional has learned, however, that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachmen

This may seem to be a paradox. Earlier I warned that the reader is an impatient bird, perched on the thin edge of distraction or sleep. Now I’m saying you must write for yourself and not be gnawed by worry over whether the reader is tagging along. I’m talking about two different issues. One is craft, the other is attitude. The first is a question o

Writing is a craft, and a writer is someone who goes to work every day with his tools, like the carpenter or the television repairman, no matter how he feels, and if one of the things he wants to produce by 6 P.M. is a sense of enjoyment in his writing, he must generate it by an act of will. Nobody else is going to do it for him.

Great creative minds] think like artists but work like accountants.”