A while ago, my secretary wanted to know how I get so much done with my various writing projects, my crafts and, of course, my job. I told her, "I work at it."
     She thought I was being flip, but it's the truth. I work at things. I stay after them. Day by day, little by little, I nibble away at them. And eventually they get done.
     Writing is like that for me. I just work at it. It's not so hard to write a page a day or maybe a few paragraphs, a couple lines of dialogue. I don't look at the whole book. All those blank pages in front of me would swallow me in their whiteness. Instead, it's just the page, the article, the craft, the project in front of me.
     I know many people who are more talented than me. They can produce excellent writing with an ease that I have envied in the past. But I don't now. They depend on inspiration and mood and so they rarely if ever finish anything. I plod along, one page at a time, but I get there. (We won't talk about those who write easily and have good working habits.)
     And that's what I think writing is: work. It's good work. It's rewarding. I wouldn't give it up for almost anything else. But it's work. Most people look at the bestselling author and say, "I want to be like her/him." They want to have written, without ever having had to write. And so they never get published because they never apply the seat of their pants to the chair. If I have any secret, it's simply that I don't shy away from work and think that joy is in the journey as well as the destination.

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