Of course, I can’t look forward to a pension, and I have to pay my own medical insurance, and I don’t get any fringe benefits or sick leave or paid vacations. Nor am I guaranteed a day’s pay just by showing up for work in the morning; if I don’t produce anything, neither do I earn anything. I can generally accept all that, but not everybody can.
There’s another essential quality in the writer’s temperament, and it seems on the surface so obvious that I came close to overlooking it altogether. Quite simply, you have to like the work.
By this I don’t mean that the physical act of sitting at a typewriter has to be enjoyable in and of itself. Most writers hate the process, to one extent or the other, and everybody hates it now and then. This is an anomaly of writing, and an interesting one at that. Most of the painters I know enjoy the act of painting…but writers often hate writing.
