Some writers need to write – others need to avoid the guilt of not writing.
Not all writers find pleasure in the act of writing – James Baldwin called his office “the torture chamber” – but all know the exquisite pleasure of having written.
My story of starting out in the '70s in Trenton, NJ: https://longreads.com/2018/07/05/letters-from-trenton/
My favorite line from Sunday's New York Times Book Review was Joe Klein's on Ben Rhodes: "He writes well, even though he has a master's degree in creative writing, and he has a good eye."
I'm off for a few days so I leave you with this essay on writing, possibly the first to contain a Polish saying and a baseball analogy:
https://lithub.com/after-dozens-of-rejections-it-only-takes-one-acceptance-to-make-a-writer/
Yesterday I went to see the Marlins play the Nationals at the Nationals’ spring training facility in West Palm Beach. It was a low-scoring game and at one point, watching a Marlin trudge back to the dugout after striking out, I wondered how I would feel if, after receiving a rejection, my office filled with the sounds of “Hit the Road Jack.”