Writers on Writing

Fiction is a great good in the world./When you're writing you let go of your negative capability. Zadie Smith



From Dangerous Minds.

Is writing torture, or more like pleasure bondage, without the pleasure?

This story has been getting around: Philip Roth advises young published writer to get out while he's ahead:

I would quit while you’re ahead. Really, it’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.

Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love) responds:

... maybe it's just vanity that makes authors gripe so much about their ordeal. Maybe writers have simply come to believe themselves to be so very special, and their work so very important, that they can't imagine anybody else capable of doing it: You, little one, could never possibly create what I have created, or withstand all that I have withstood, so you'd best not try at all.

Writer Lauren B. Davis sums it all up nicely in her blog. Best to start here. The proper response, she says, is to dig in and say: You had me at torture.

You've got to work

Don't let your yesterday 
pave the way to more future dramatic play! 
Remember this Scientific Fact... 
by the time it reaches your senses 
it's already an artifact... 
Plug Your Input back into the Source 
and Affect Change In Your Life From That Space... 

Kurt Johnson

Sure, the rhyming is corny. The scansion and meter are atrocious. You could also make a case that artmaking is often better after dramatic play. This was taken from a quick Facebook post so its shortcomings can be forgiven. (I don't know the author. He was a Friend of a Friend.) 

But the concept is sound: Don't let blockage or bad critiques or poor responses—or fear—chill your motivation. Go back to why you do it in the first place—the source—sally forth and do what you do that only you can do. That voodoo that you do so well. 

If for no other reason because for today—or any day, really—the greatest success we have is for us to just keep working.