What is the hardest thing about being a writer?
The hardest part of writing is sitting down and doing it. Only after a while, when something takes you over and you are no longer writing but, it seems, you are being written, does writing become a possession. Jan Ryhs used to say, “A writer is a pen,” and I would ask, “Do you imagine the pen in the hand of someone else?” and she would answer, “In the hand of someone better than you are.” She also said, “All of writing is a huge lake, and there are great river that feed the like, such as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and there are trickles that feed the lake, like Jean Rhys. One must keep feeding the lake.”
