Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

If writing feels hard, it might be because you’re doing it correctly.

Writing is thinking. Real thinking. The kind that digs deeper than surface level assumptions. Of course it’s exhausting. Thinking clearly is really fricken hard.

Difficulty is part of the reward.

Writing is so unnatural & hard for me that I have a good deal of difficulty in getting myself to undergo the hardship. It's a good deal like "sweating blood" for me. And unless I am driven by terrible feelings or convictions, I am inclined to go on & do nothing. I hate writing. It is the greatest hardship of my life. It seems to me I might be reasonably happy if I weren't everlastingly nagged by the obligation to perpetuate literary things on people.

Yes, it's hard to write. But it's harder not to.

Writing a novel is agony.

Writing isn’t fun. It’s the hardest work in the world. The very, very hardest. I mean creative writing. If it’s reportorial, it’s a different thing. When you have to create a whole milieu, with characters and background, that’s a different thing entirely. … Oh, you start out all enthusiastic. But after two or three chapters it becomes plain drudgery. I worked about ten hours the other night just on correcting and rewriting, because what you write originally is just a shadow of what you had in mind.

Writing can wreck your body. You sit there on the chair hour after hour and sweat your guts out to get a few words.

It's not the writing part that's hard. What's hard is sitting down to write.

What keeps us from sitting down is Resistance.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times ALREADY – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times already – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.

Remember this as a consolation in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.

Writing for me, 95% of the time, it's torture, because I'm basically walking through the forest blindfolded trying to feel my way through and then I'm almost there, and I can sort of take it off and then see where I'm at, and then I have to go back and sort of move things around and make sure it's all feeling cohesive. But the process itself can feel really arduous and a real struggle to get through. I think everyone has their own process and mine is particularly torturous.

If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works, with all the misconceptions, the omissions, the failures that any finished work of art implies.

All writing is difficult. The most you can hope for is a day when it goes reasonably easily. Plumbers don’t get plumber’s block, and doctors don’t get doctor’s block; why should writers be the only profession that gives a special name to the difficulty of working, and then expects sympathy for it?