What was it like to be a writer?
It was tremendous fun. Coming home from an arduous day at the hospital, I would go straight to my yellow pad and write my tensions away. The words just flowed. It was easy.
Writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling himself. He is also going broke.
Professional writers are solitary drudges who seldom see other writers.
There isn't "right" way to do such personal work. There are all kinds of writers and all kinds of methods, and any method that helps you to say what you want to say is the right method for you. Some people write by day, others by night.
But all writers are vulnerable and all of them are tense. They are driven by a compulsion to put some part of themselves on paper, and yet they don't just write what comes naturally. They sit down to commit an act of literature, and the self who emerges on paper is far stiffer than the person who sat down to write. The problem is to find the real man or woman behind the tension.
Ultimately, the product that any writer has to sell is not the subject being written about, but who he or she is.
This is the personal transaction that's at the heart of good nonfiction writing. Out of it come two of the most important qualities that we will go in search of: humanity and warmth.
Good writing has an aliveness that keeps the reader reading from one paragraph to the next, and it's not a question of gimmicks to "personalize" the author.
It's a question of using the English language in a way that will achieve the greatest clarity and strength.