One Writer

As we ply our trade, often alone, often confused, it can help to know that other writers felt the same way. I came across this description of her early writing days penned by Edna Ferber,  Pulitzer Prize-winning author and a triple threat: she wrote short stories, plays, and beloved novels like Showboat and Giant, many of which were made into films:

“I settled down as best I could to write a certain number of hours daily in a bedroom with the family life swirling around me. Here there was no convenient spidery little lean-to off the dining room into which I could creep. I made no elaborate arrangements for my daily stint of writing because I didn’t regard myself as a writer. I just wrote. I worked in a bedroom because I didn’t dream of affording a separate workroom. Sometimes I thought vaguely that it would be marvelous to work without interruption, but this actually seemed beyond my imagination. It is a curious thing about writers. Some of us work heartbreakingly hard, like stevedores, like truck drivers, like slaves, and we get a few hundred dollars a year for our pains. Some of us work heartbreakingly hard, like stevedores, like truck drivers, like slaves, and we get a quarter of a million a year (some years). But the difficulty in getting a room and decent privacy in which to accomplish the earning of our living is almost insurmountable. People don’t understand. One’s family mysteriously doesn’t understand. It all seems so easy — a typewriter, or a pencil and a piece of paper. Nothing to be fussy about. For years my mother spoke of my work as ‘Edna’s typewriting.’ The fact that creative writing is a good deal like having a baby every day for so many hours daily doesn’t occur to the layman, and he wouldn’t believe you if you told him.”

This passage is from A Peculiar Treasure, Edna’s autobiography. Inspired and emboldened by our fellow scribe, let’s all write on!

 

 

 

 

About karinwritesdangerously

I am a writer and this is a motivational blog designed to help both writers and aspiring writers to push to the next level. Key themes are peak performance, passion, overcoming writing roadblocks, juicing up your creativity, and the joys of writing.
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