I’m reading Graham Swift’s Making an Elephant: Writing from Within (if you’ve never read Swift, go get a copy of Last Orders this minute and do so!) and came across the following passage, which gave me great comfort:

“It was one thing — not a difficult thing — to want to be a writer; another to become one… Looking back on it, I think the truth was that I was scared of my ambition, scared of discovering that I didn’t have what it took to fulfil it.”

Hmmm … even Booker Prize winners can have doubt.

And this passage:

“I wonder now if the notion of the natural writer isn’t entirely mythical. The natural writers are just the ones who make it look natural — even Tolstoy idn’t work in an oracular trance. But when I was seventeen, turning eighteen, I certainly believed in natural writers. I thought they were the real writers. And this was perhaps the nub of my fear about my ambition: I knew I wasn’t a natural writer. If I were, I’d already be a writer; there’d be no question of becoming one. The only way I could be a writer would be by making myself one, by squeezing the writer out of me. By work.”

Inspires me to squeeze a little harder! – Meg