You may have said those words once or twice yourself, perhaps? (If not, please leave this blog. Now.)
It may comfort you to know that you are not alone in that sentiment: even established writers think so, now and then—and have for decades, if not centuries. To prove it, Michael Hoffman has combed [...]

When I first got to college, I was pretty sure that I was an admissions mistake. My roommate was one of Glamour’s College Women of the Year. Another girl downstairs played piano with the Philharmonic; the guy down the hall was almost sixteen. A guy on the first floor held two patents. [...]

That’s how I’d have capitalized this recent article by The Atlantic, which asked that rather big question. Describing Alex Jenni, a French biology teacher who recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, the article noted,
In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or [...]

Everywhere you look, there are reasons not to write. If you believe in omens–as I do–you may start to wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something.
You may feel like you shouldn’t even start writing. Recently, the Huffington Post offered 10 reasons not to write your novel. And some [...]

Like many writers, I tend to think of job-related writing–like copywriting, or editing, or ghostwriting memos–as Not Really Writing. In the Huffington Post, though, Holly Robinson expresses a very different point of view:
“Doesn’t it bug you to write other people’s books when you could be working on your own?” another writer asked me recently.
Not [...]

Recently Chip Cheek, a writer and the administration coordinator at Grub Street in Boston, quit his job—even though he loved it. He explains why in an essay on Grub Street’s blog:
I have always had a full-time job, even while I was getting my MFA. It has seemed the prudent thing to do: keep a [...]

So maybe Tuesday’s post on the 10-year novel got you down. Here’s some encouragement: lit site The Rumpus is introducing a new occasional column, “The Long Haul,” featuring writers reflecting on the (long-term) writing life. Or, as the editors put it:
Whether you’re a literary wunderkind whose first book was a bestseller, or one [...]

n Slate.com, Susanna Daniels reflects on the process of writing her first novel—which she describes as “the quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing”:
During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My “novel” (which had started to wear its own air quotes [...]

For many aspiring writers, that’s the big question: How do you get from #1 to #3? No one can guarantee that you’ll actually profit, of course, but certain steps make it much much much more likely that your work will get out there and find an audience. Though I’m certainly no expert, I’ve [...]

aybe it’s summer—too sunny out to work inside!—or maybe it’s just the 80º+ weather in Boston, but I’ve been feeling a little… tired. Just in time, Paperback Writer has a post on how to combat fatigue—physical, mental, and, most importantly for writers, creative:
Creating on demand, always being on, always being told we’re not good [...]