Expat Writer: Are You Ready to Bleed?

The writing life is hell, I’m sure you agree. Today I am so uninspired, so uninspired, I . . . I can’t even finish this sentence. I don’t feel like writing. I can’t squeeze out a drop of writing juice. I’m sure it’s all been sweated out in the heat here in Moldova. (When you need an excuse not to write, anything will do.)

So instead of coming up with deep thoughts and scintillating tales of my own, I’m offering you some insights and wisdom from other scribes about the travails of the writing life:

Writing is easy:  All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.  — Gene Fowler

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed. — Ernest Hemingway

Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing.  – Norman Mailer

Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.   — E.L. Doctorow

Writing is not necessarily something to be ashamed of, but do it in private and wash your hands afterwards.  — Robert Heinlein

The problem with writing about religion is that you run the risk of offending sincerely religious people, and then they come after you with machetes.  — Dave Barry

Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, and then for a few close friends, and then for money. –  Moliere

Graffiti in the Amsterdam Red Light District

The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shockproof shit detector.  This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.  — Ernest Hemingway

(Is there an app for that?)

One must be drenched in words, literally soaked in them, to have the right ones form themselves into the proper pattern at the right moment.   — Hart Cran

(Drenching and soaking — one hopes there’s alcohol involved. Literally.)

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that’s read by persons who move their lips when they’re reading to themselves.   — Don Marquis

We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. — Prof. Robert Silensky

A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.  — Edith Sitwell

I should get me some rabbits. — Miss Footloose

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