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.
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.
A while back I wrote about how writing is like Michelangelo creating David from a block of marble. The act of creation in turning a hulk of rock into a glorious sculpture. I was reminded of this... when one... [someone] mentioned that writing a first draft is actually creating the marble itself, creating something out of nothing first. Then the subsequent rewrites and edits turn it from a block of stone into a beautiful sculpture.
Once you've quarried the marble, carve. And carve and carve. And carve. That's where the real fun begins.
More from this great post on How It Feels to Finish the First Draft of Your Novel.
You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. Anne Lamott
This and other bon mots from her Twitter: @ANNLAMOTT
True freedom is liberating somebody else by telling your story, and even though it exposes you, it will set somebody else free. Oprah Winfrey
To the degree we're not living our dreams, our comfort zone has more control of us than we have over ourselves. Peter McWilliams
Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.
Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes
Perseverance, my fellow geniuses, can often mean having to stand against being understood by friends, lovers, etc, as a stubborn eccentric. To find power in truth, personal truth, is the essence of the good life. And, if truth destroys something––as has been said––then it may truly be something that needs to be destroyed. What can be more noble than destroying fraud with truth? That is capital T truth.
