It’s Hard for Everyone – All You Get is the Bacon Rinds Ernest Hemingway QUOTES FOR WRITERS
What you ought to do is write you big lazy bastard. My god it is hard for anybody to write. I never start a damn thing without knowing 200 times I can’t write—never will be able to write a line—can’t go on—can’t get started—stuff is rotten—can’t say what I mean—know there is a whole fine complete thing and all I get of it is the bacon rinds. You would write better than anybody but the minute it becomes impossible you stop. That is the time you have to go on through and then it gets easier. It always gets utterly and completely impossible.
Thank God it does—otherwise everybody would write and I would starve to death.
Ernest Hemingway
Letter to Waldo Pierce, 1st Oct 1928
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway: Volume 2
(I found this in Shawn Usher’s wonderful newsletter which shares the best letters in history)
Image credit: Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
2 comments on “It’s Hard for Everyone – All You Get is the Bacon Rinds Ernest Hemingway QUOTES FOR WRITERS”
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A Good Confession
"Unputdownable" Miriam Stoppard
BRIDGET WHELAN writer 
… self discipline is the key…
Fear of the white [a villanelle]
The page is blank and quite pristine
It waits for words with purpose clear
Blank and unwritten, still quite clean
I try to form an opening scene
Although the blank page seems to jeer
The page is blank and quite pristine
I long to vent frustrated spleen
But words elude me fully here
Blank and unwritten, still quite clean
Too many thoughts I flit between
Although I try my mind to steer
The page is blank, and quite pristine
I tell myself that I am keen
And push away emotion drear
Blank and unwritten, still quite clean
Too long I stared; my thoughts unseen
I give in to the challenged fear
The page is blank and quite pristine
Blank and unwritten, still quite clean
That is wonderful and true. The blank page often wins and yes, the only answer is to write even if it is absolute rubbish. And keep on writing. As Samuel Becket says Fail, fail, fail better