Never been a fan and fantasy is not really a genre I have ever enjoyed but for me Robert Jordan has a lot to say about what writing fiction is about and I think anybody with an interest in literature should listen to the man. This is what he wrote a while ago on the subject.....
Put up or shut up
If you want to be a writer, go be an accountant. If you want to write, write.
I know a lot of people who want to be a writer, and it's a very different thing from wanting to write.
It doesn't do any good to think about writing. It doesn't do any good to talk about writing. It doesn't do any good to go to cafés and sit there in your black turtle neck sweater with a coffee or beer and impress the girls with the fact that you are a writer, if what you have is the same three chapters sitting in a drawer that have been there for the last five years.
You write. You send it to a publisher. And when you've put it in the mail, you start writing again.
You send it to a publisher because the act of creation is not complete until you have an observer. It doesn't matter whether it's writing, or painting, or sculpting. If a painter sticks a painting in a closet, if a sculptor throws a drop cloth over the sculpture, the act of creation is not complete. Completion happens when you put it in front of an observer.
I don't think so many people want to write—I think people want to be writers. Dorothy Parker said, 'I love having written, but I hate writing.' I think it's the same with a lot of people. And everybody believes that they have a story in them—everyone wants to believe that they could do it if they wanted to.
They think they have a story, and maybe they do. But just because you have a story inside you, doesn't mean you can write it, any more than having a gallstone means you can pass it. I no longer believe that everybody can write. It's not that easy.
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To write, you have to have discipline. The discipline can vary. It depends on what other job you have. If you say, 'I'm going to write one hour a day seven days a week,' that's enough if you have another job. It's a commitment.
Maybe you'll say, 'I'm going to write one page that every day that I'm satisfied with. If I knock it out in ten minutes, I'll quit. If I have to sit there half a night, I'll stay with it.' If you do that, at the end of a year you've got 365 pages of manuscript and that is not a fat novel, but it's a novel.
For me, I write seven days a week, 8-10 hours a day, sometimes more. This is how I make my living. I don't have to go off to an office or a factory.
If my wife wants us to go somewhere for a day, that's fine. But there've been times when she's actually brought me down to the front porch where I've found a fishing guide waiting. She'll say, 'The man has already been paid to take you fishing. Go get in his truck. Go!'
I just see my life continuing until it ends. I intend to live! Most people exist. They simply do the job, go home, go to sleep, get up, go to work, go home, go to sleep. And it's understandable if you have a factory job—you can get very tired, you don't want to live. I'm lucky.
I know my life is going to end.
I was 19 when I realized I was going to die for sure. On my first tour in Vietnam the helicopter I was in blew up and threw me into the jungle. I got up and ran back through the lines of an NVA ambush—I didn't know it was there—I just knew the other chopper was in that direction.
This knowledge changes your view of the world. I think it gives you a certain maturity. Perhaps maturity is the knowledge that everything is going to change, that neither you nor anything you see is going to go on forever*
