Frederick Lim

A Day in the Life of a Writer

Writing is a journey - and as with every journey, there will be good days, and there will be bad days. And the journey can come with deep emotions of pleasure and pain.

Watch on my Youtube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYbBx...

And when you get down to writing a novel the emotional states of pleasure and pain come in varying degrees which go up and down a sliding scale - as you go through the stages of ideation, conception, creation, crafting, revising, editing, publishing and marketing.

The pleasure comes when you are pleased with something you have created. Or when you have been able to express something really well. Or when your work is widely recognized.

The pain can be many and often – and it is especially painful when you feel that you have put in good work and it goes unrecognized.
But when in pain the greatest comfort I draw upon is that even the greatest writers go through the same emotional states as I do - as in the various quotes I have found online:

ISOLATION
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life… For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”

—Ernest Hemingway

AGONY
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

—Maya Angelou

PRIDE
“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.”

—Stephen King

DEPRESSION
Rejection slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.”

—Isaac Asimov

DEJECTION
“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

—Sylvia Plath