Writing is not about making a buck, not about publishers and agents. Writing is not about feeling good. Writing is about pain, suffering, hard work, risk, and fear.
Interpretation
Writing is a challenging and emotional process that goes beyond commercial success.
Sue Grafton emphasizes that writing is fundamentally an art form that involves deep emotional struggles and significant personal sacrifice. It is not simply a means to financial gain or a source of emotional comfort; instead, it demands rigorous effort, vulnerability, and the courage to confront one's fears and pain through the act of creation.
In practice
During a writing workshop, I shared this quote to illustrate the dedication required in writing.
Except for cases that clearly involve a homicidal maniac, the police like to believe murders are committed by those we know and love, and most of the time they're right - a chilling thought when you sit down to dinner with a family of five. All those potential killers passing their plates.
My second husband and I were going through a bitter divorce, and I didn't have the money for a fancy-pants attorney. I didn't know how to fight, so I'd lie awake at night and think of ways to kill him. But I knew I'd get caught, so I decided to put it in a book and get paid for it! I always think it's odd that a whole career came out of that homicidal impulse.
There are days when none of us can bear it, but the good comes around again. Happiness is seasonal, like anything else. Wait it out. There are people who love you. People who can help.
So much of the past in encapsulated in the odds and ends. Most of us discard more information about ourselves than we ever care to preserve. Our recollection of the past is not simply distorted by our faulty perception of events remembered but skewed by those forgotten. The memory is like twin orbiting stars, one visible, one dark, the trajectory of what's evident forever affected by the gravity of what's concealed.
Ghosts don't haunt us. That's not how it works. They're present among us because we won't let go of them.
A woman should never, never, never be financially dependent to anyone, especially a man, because the minute you were dependent, you could be abused.
I like being like a chameleon who transforms himself with each role.
The most extraordinary thing about writing is that when you've struck the right vein, tiredness goes. It must be an effort, thinking wrong.
Racist writing is a craft failure.
I think poetry is as old as language, and both come out of the same thing - an effort to try to express something that is inexpressible.
Here let dead poetry rise once more to life.
Performers are so vulnerable. They're frightened of humiliation, sure their work will be crap. I try to make an environment where it's warm, where it's OK to fail - a kind of home, I suppose.
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