Poet and novelist James Dickey, author of Deliverance (the novel that was the basis for the 1972 film of the same name), offered some advice to aspiring writers in this 1982 “Writer’s Workshop” Q&A session hosted by the University of South Carolina:
Dickey’s advice:
Ask yourself one question: “Do I really love it? Do I love to write? If there were a lot of circumstances that conspired to keep me from writing, would I still write because I love it?” If you can say yes to that, you ought to write, no matter what happens to what you write or what happens to you.
Dickey notes that German writer Gottfried Benn once said: “If somebody told me that I had to crawl down gutters and sewers the rest of my life in order to be able to write, I would do it.”
He adds:
If you have that strong a conviction, or even some variation of that feeling, that would be the advice, to encourage that in yourself if you have it. If you don’t have it, you shouldn’t try it because the frustrations are too great. […]
I remember something that late Randall Jarrell once said: “A writer, a poet is someone who spends his whole life standing out in thunderstorms, hoping to be struck by lightning. Struck once, authentically struck, he’s remembered. A half a dozen times and he’s great.”