Writing Struggle Quotes

My father's father wrote for a Philadelphia newspaper and aspired to be a playwright. We had in our house a couple of crazy unproduced plays that he had written. For the one creative writing class I took in my life, I didn't do any writing - I decided that I would plagiarize his terrible play to not fail the class.

How could I make a little book, when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

The hardest part is telling one's story. Once the story is on the page, the rest will come.

I can always make things longer than I intend for them to be, but cutting things down is just brutal. It's like cutting off your fingers every time you lose a word.

To hold a pen is to be at war.

I have to do draft after draft... It takes me a long time, but I love doing it, and I have to do it every day, or I feel slack.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

Write 1000 words a day. That's only about four pages, but force yourself to do it. Put your finger down your throat and throw up. That's what writing's all about.

I never laugh or smile when I am writing. When I come home for lunch after writing all morning, my wife says I look like I just came home from a funeral. This is not bragging. This is an illness.

When I am writing, even though it's hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I'm not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I'm not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic.

Writing a novel is like childbirth: once you realize how awful it really is, you never want to do it again.

I have a problem with beginnings... and endings... and middles. But I don't know what else I would do. I find it very, very difficult to write. It takes everything; it's physically and mentally and emotionally exhausting for me. And my neighbours. And my dog.

...for the first time in my life, writing was hard. The problem was the teaching...by most Friday afternoons I felt as if I'd spent the week with jumper cables clamped to my brain.

I hated being a novelist when I was 20 - I had nothing to write about.

Writing in English is the most ingenious torture ever devised for sins committed in previous lives. The English reading public explains the reason why.

Writing stopped being fun when I discovered the difference between good writing and bad and, even more terrifying, the difference between it and true art. And after that, the whip came down.

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound.

It's often a matter of sitting in front of the computer and worrying. It's what writing comes down to--worrying that things aren't going to work out.

I still think of things for 'Jill' all the time. It's annoying, because I want to be able to find another character who I could write for indefinitely.

I graduated from college December of 2017 and looking ahead and thinking about potentially starting a book, I just kept getting hung up before even starting because I didn't want to write a book that only people that have served in the military or that have been to combat could understand.

I'm very unhappy about my entire life if my writing is going wrong.

You know, writing isn't easy. It's tedious. Ideas have a gestation period, and after a while, it becomes difficult.

All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.

Writing is difficult. It's a time commitment, it's labor and I'd have to get myself to sit down and actually do the work and outline.