Jonah saw God's will as punishment. Jesus saw God's will as nourishment.
Writing on your own is, in a way, a very lonely profession. There's no one there to help you.
For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.
The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.
The simplest explanation is most often the correct one.
There are some writers I think who love to go around and visit bookstores and just interact.
My first job out of college was as an editorial assistant in a New York publishing house. Being an editorial assistant is the purgatory would-be editors must endure before they can ascend the ladder and begin acquiring books on their own. I spent a year filing paperwork, writing copy, and typing rejection letters.
Fidelity--a strong itch with a prohibition to scratch.
I wonder if any of them can tell from just looking at me that all I am is the sum total of my pain, a raw woundedness so extreme that it might be terminal. It might be terminal velocity, the speed of the sound of a girl falling down to a place from where she can't be retrieved. What if I am stuck down here for good?
Now everybody has to work together. They are the fourth estate. Incredibly powerful.
The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion.