Writing is hard.
Did you know that?
That is how it works.
Making great art should be incredibly hard.
Good-grief, anything worth doing should be difficult.
This should all seem obvious, but so many can’t seem to get past comparing themselves to others.
Don’t fall prey to this.
Largely, overnight easy success you see in your peers is a myth.
Most all success is a result of persistence.
This is because grit wins.
Boldness and discipline trumps passion.
“Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying in six weeks; he claimed he knocked it off in his spare time from a twelve-hour-a-day job performing manual labor. There are other examples from other continents and centuries, just as albinos, assassins, saints, big people, and little people show up from time to time in large populations. Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a serious book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in barrels, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms.”
–Annie Dillard, The Writing Life