"If you lack confidence in setting one word after another and sense that you are stuck in a place from which you will never be set free, if you feel sure that you will never make it and we're not cut out to do this, if your prose seems stillborn and you completely lack confidence, you must be a writer.
If you say you see things differently and describe your efforts positively, if you tell people that you 'just love to write', you may be delusional."
That nugget is from John McPhee, in the April 29, 2013 "New Yorker". He's one of my favorite essayists, so if angst and self-doubt are good enough for him, they're good enough for me.
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