If you want to know why writing is so hard for people, ask them: “When was the last time you focused on one thing for more than an hour, without any distractions?”
A lack of focus is as limiting as a lack of skill.
Feeling like you’re worth listening to is a byproduct of making hard decisions and teasing out of them cohesive and convincing personal stories that help you make sense of the world.
In my experience, there is no such thing as “clerical work” in writing: the donkey work is crucial to the process, as is having to sort through the mess of the draft — that’s the art of self-editing, and it’s the art of finding what you didn’t know you were looking for
'In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either. Now, running to a thing, that's a different matter,