I thought you guys would like this, especially you newbies who don't yet know what you're facing.
I was researching more epigraph quotes, when I stumbled upon an excellent selection of James Baldwin's (for WikiQuote, of all places), and it made me realize I've got to make several significant changes in my current novel. But that website let me to James Baldwin's Advice on Writing.
Here are a few of the more telling quotes:
The terrible thing about being a writer is that you don't decide to become one, you discover that you are one.
Writing is …
Something that irritates you and won't let you go. That's the anguish of it. Do this book, or die. You have to go through that. Talent is insignificant. I know a lot of talented ruins. Beyond talent lie all the usual words: discipline, love, luck, but most of all, endurance.
If you are going to be a writer there is nothing I can say to stop you; if you're not going to be a writer nothing I can say will help you. What you really need at the beginning is somebody to let you know that the effort is real.
The following is largely about his choice of topics (growing up poor in the American South in the 50s), but I think it's true about all writing. To really be successful, an author has to reveal the unexamined truths which are both difficult to hear, and even more difficult to live via immersing yourself in them on a daily basis:
When you're writing, you're trying to find out something which you don't know. The whole language of writing for me is finding out what you don't want to know, what you don't want to find out. But something forces you to anyway.
Rewriting [is] very painful. You know it's finished when you can't do anything more to it, though it's never exactly the way you want it… The hardest thing in the world is simplicity. And the most fearful thing, too. You have to strip yourself of all your disguises, some of which you didn't know you had. You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal.
And one which fits me to a "T":
I start working when everyone has gone to bed. I've had to do that ever since I was young — I had to wait until the kids were asleep. And then I was working at various jobs during the day. I've always had to write at night. But now that I'm established I do it because I'm alone at night.
