Goodreads asked Terez Mertes Rose:

What’s your advice for aspiring writers?

Terez Mertes Rose If you don’t love the process, really love to write, well, don’t do it. If you can’t NOT write, well, there you go. Write. The reward is in the journey, and journeys don’t pay well. I am okay with the fact that I’ve devoted an astonishing number of hours over the past twenty years to project after project, with very, very little income generated. We’re talking something like $2.00 a week for a thirty hour work week. But what do I get instead of money? Oh, wow. My spirit, soul and heart all sing when I’m engrossed in my work, or when I look over a finished product. It’s a good feeling like nothing else on earth. Over the years, I’ve tried the 9a-5p route, the sales representative route, the hotel and food/beverage industry route, the teacher route, and nothing, nothing, came close to nourishing me like my writing has. If that’s the way you feel, too, well, WRITE. But do this, too: try those other worlds, those other jobs. Bump along in the wrong place for a while. Nothing makes the right place resonate more than finding it after living in the wrong place/space for a while. And besides, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to have something to write about. Don’t go immersing yourself in your ivory tower, away from the real world, all the time. That’s escaping life. Writing shouldn’t be about escaping life. It should be about taking what’s tough, what’s unutterably beautiful, what’s baffling or enraging, and using your skills as a sensitive, thinking person, to craft prose that reflects how you feel about the world. Or that shines a new light on an issue, a problem.

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