“Writing isn’t fun. It’s the hardest work in the world. The very, very hardest. I mean creative writing. If it’s reportorial, it’s a different thing. When you have to create a whole milieu, with characters and background, that’s a different thing entirely. … Oh, you start out all enthusiastic. But after two or three chapters it becomes plain drudgery. I worked about ten hours the other night just on correcting and rewriting, because what you write originally is just a shadow of what you had in mind.”

— Taylor Caldwell

1970s-, The Captains, the Kings, and Taylor Caldwell (1978)

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Taylor Caldwell 31

Novelist 1900–1985

Stewart O'Nan (1961) American writer

“Writing is hard work. A clear sentence is no accident. Very few sentences come out right the first time, or even the third time. Remember this in moments of despair. If you find that writing is hard, it's because it is hard. It's one of the hardest things that people do.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 2, Simplicity, p. 12.

“I haven't found it difficult because I find this very enjoyable. It's really challenging. And I'm really proud of the record because it's a really good record. There's nothing harder than to write a pop record with meaning. I think it's much easier to be alternative. It's much easier to be different and take a different path outside of a commercial context. To try and write a pop song that is not cliché, to try and write a pop song that has meaning and fits in under three minutes and five seconds and has a hook that people want to listen to is the most difficult thing in the world to do. So in lieu of that you have to write what you know and what you like, what you're feeling. That's all I can basically do. I don't begrudge the other people that don't write their songs. And I don't judge them. I'd like to see more people writing their own songs, because that's just personally what I like. Just for me, as an artist, so many people only care about being popular right now. Whatever happened to trying to write a song that means something? When I was growing up, artists meant something. They had opinions, they looked different than the person working at the store on your street. They opened your eyes and taught you something about life. And I would like to aspire to be that kind of artist.”

Colleen Fitzpatrick (1972) American singer and actress

When asked about writing her own music
Attributed

“The hardest thing about writing is writing.”

Nora Ephron (1941–2012) Film director, author screenwriter

“I'm not a great believer in writing courses, though it must be said I've never been in one. It probably depends on what kind of writer you are. I'm very un-analytical about what I do. I don't plan much for the first draft. I try to let characters come out by themselves, rather than designing them. But other writers work differently, and for them the teaching process - which at least forces you to consider what you're doing, and why - may be very helpful. At the very least a creative writing course mandates someone to spend a period of their life just writing, which can be hard to do otherwise. But beware of thinking too much about what you do.”

Michael Marshall Smith (1965) British novelist, screenwriter and short story writer

Associated Content Interview (October 23, 2006)

“Writing is the hardest work in the world. I have been a bricklayer and a truck driver, and I tell you – as if you haven't been told a million times ALREADY – that writing is harder. Lonelier. And nobler and more enriching.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

As quoted in Quit Your Day Job!: How to Sleep Late, Do What You Enjoy, and Make a Ton of ... (2004) by James D. Denney, p. 124 https://books.google.com/books?isbn=1884956041

“Mostly, you write a script and someone’s gonna rewrite you. They get hundreds of— not hundred but they get ten writers to write something. If you have a big budget, you can go and get a lot of people to write on script…. I just actually heard that somebody said, 'Well, your screenplay got bought and now someone like Carrie Fisher will come in and rewrite you.' And I feel terrible, you know, because that’s not what I mean to do. My idea was never to raid something and trash it, you know. ‘Cause that – that’s more work for me!”

Carrie Fisher (1956–2016) American actress, screenwriter and novelist

From the filmmaking documentary Dreams on Spec

“I loved writing about things when I was excited about them. It's not fun writing about bad movies. I used to think it was bad for my skin. It's painful writing about the bad things in an art form, particularly when young kids are going to be enthusiastic about those things, because they haven't seen anything better, or anything different.”

Pauline Kael (1919–2001) American film critic

Quoted in Francis Davis, Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael (Da Capo, 2003, ISBN 0-306-81230-4).

“I write description in longhand because that's hardest for me and you're closer to the paper when you work by hand, but I use the typewriter for dialogue because people speak like a typewriter works.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

“The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write.”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

A Letter from Cuba (1934)
Context: The hardest thing to do is to write straight honest prose on human beings. First you have to know the subject; then you have to know how to write. Both take a lifetime to learn, and anybody is cheating who takes politics as a way out. All the outs are too easy, and the thing itself is too hard to do.

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