The Plot (The Book Series, #1)

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

All he had ever wanted was to tell—in the best possible words, arranged in the best possible order—the stories inside him.

and you paid that debt by getting down to work, not just as a journeyman fabricator of sentences but as an unshrinking artist ready to make painful, time-consuming, even self-flagellating mistakes. Rising to this responsibility was a matter of facing your blank page (or screen) and muzzling the critics inside your head, at least long enough for you to get some work done, all of which was profoundly difficult and none of which was optional.