Words on Writing from Chuck Wendig

From Chuck Wendig’s blog. He’s a best selling horror author who lives somewhere near Doylestown, PA.

“It’s never precisely easy to be a writer – professional or otherwise. I mean, it’s easy in the sense of, hey, anybody can open a word processor and start (fiercely or methodically) putting a story down on the page, one mad word at a time. But it’s also quite hard: you have to reckon with a difficult industry, a lack of respect and recognition from the non-writers in your life, a schedule that surely isn’t conducive, a dearth of proper places to actually sit down and make the words happen, and so forth. Writing always, always feels like an act that vacillates wildly between the Herculean and the Sisyphean – always difficult, sometimes triumphant, sometimes you’re pancaked by the boulder you’ve been shoving up the hill for days, weeks, months, years …

I want you to tell those stories. Your stories. The ones that matter most to you — not the ones that feed machines, not the ones that feed companies, but the ones that feed you, and by proxy, the audience beyond you.”

Chuck Wendig