In his Life of Dr Samuel Johnson, James
Boswell famously wrote that only a blockhead would write for any reason except
to make money.
This is a profoundly unhelpful statement because,
if you wait to receive an assignment to write, you will never become a
writer. And if you wait for a publisher to offer you an advance before
you put pen to paper, you will throw away any chance you ever had of becoming
an accomplished writer.
Writers are people who write. We write because we have
to. Our writing is a special form of the social propensity to make up
stories in order to understand our lives. We put down on paper what
others merely utter in conversations, or think about in their heads in the dead
of night, when they are forced by wakefulness to contemplate where they have
been, and where they think they might be going in their lives.
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