David Rain's Blog - Posts Tagged "hundred-book-challenge"
The Hundred-Book Challenge: What does your reading say about you?
When students tell me they want to be writers, I ask them three questions. The first is: “Why?” The answers are usually vague. Seldom, indeed never in my experience, does anyone talk about being rich and famous. The commonest response is: “I just enjoy writing.”
This is better, but not as promising as it sounds. Plenty of people enjoy writing without being good at it, and professional writing, with its endless drafts and revisions, involves difficult and often frustrating work that the most hardened professional won’t, in any immediate sense, enjoy. No worthwile occupation is enjoyable all the time. Being a writer is an activity as serious as being a doctor, a lawyer, a farmer, or a physicist. If you think that’s a pretentious thing to say, fine. But you’ll never be a good writer unless you’re sustained by a deep and abiding sense of mission. Continue reading
This is better, but not as promising as it sounds. Plenty of people enjoy writing without being good at it, and professional writing, with its endless drafts and revisions, involves difficult and often frustrating work that the most hardened professional won’t, in any immediate sense, enjoy. No worthwile occupation is enjoyable all the time. Being a writer is an activity as serious as being a doctor, a lawyer, a farmer, or a physicist. If you think that’s a pretentious thing to say, fine. But you’ll never be a good writer unless you’re sustained by a deep and abiding sense of mission. Continue reading
