"Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that..."

“Writing is difficult. You do it all alone without encouragement and without any certainty that you’ll ever be published or paid or even that you’ll be able to finish the particular work you’ve begun. It isn’t easy to persist amid all that. […] Sometimes when I’m interviewed, the interviewer either compliments me on my ‘talent’, my ‘gift’ or asks me how I discovered it. […] I used to struggle to answer this politely, to explain that I didn’t believe much in writing talent. People who want to...