Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.
Interpretation
Writing is challenging but ultimately rewarding.
In this quote, John Grisham reflects on the challenges of writing, indicating that despite its difficulties, the fulfillment and satisfaction gained from the process make it worthwhile. He emphasizes the struggle inherent in creative work while also celebrating the value and joy that come from overcoming those obstacles.
In practice
A motivational speech about pursuing creative work despite its challenges.
Nobody wants to read about the honest lawyer down the street who does real estate loans and wills. If you want to sell books, you have to write about the interesting lawyers - the guys who steal all the money and take off. That's the fun stuff.
Death row is a nightmare to serial killers and ax murderers. For an innocent man, it's a life of mental torture that the human spirit is not equipped to survive.
An outline is crucial. It saves so much time. When you write suspense, you have to know where you're going because you have to drop little hints along the way. With the outline, I always know where the story is going. So before I ever write, I prepare an outline of 40 or 50 pages.
I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial.
Ten years from now I plan to be sitting here, looking out over my land. I hope I'll be writing books, but if not, I'll be on my pond fishing with my kids. I feel like the luckiest guy I know.
I used to walk in a bookstore and see all these books on the walls. And I would say, 'Who wants to hear from me? What do I have to add to all of this?'
I think you too recognize the important relationship between philosophy and art, and it is just this relationship that most painters deny. The great masters do grasp it, unconsciously; but I believe that a painter's conscious spiritual knowledge will have a much greater influence upon his art, and that it would be due only to a weakness in him, or lack of genius, should this spiritual knowledge be harmful to his art.
It's tricky when you're doing a recording, because the only weapon you have is your voice and the delivery of that voice. You don't have a gesture or a facial expression, there are no costumes or set pieces. Everything needs to be present in the voice.
Sometime reality is too complex. Stories give it form.
What does one prefer? An art that struggles to change the social contract, but fails? Or one that seeks to please and amuse, and succeeds?
I try to stick with things that I can sing with honesty.
Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
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