Writers on writing …

… From 1974: Walker Percy on the humbling, eccentric craft of writing | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Writing for a living is, for some reason or other, the only occupation to which people still ascribe a species of demonism. This state of affairs is probably the last legacy of 100 years of bad romanticism, the writer possessed, the writer post-epileptic. So that to the odd but recurring question, how do you go about writing, all sensible answers are necessarily unsatisfactory and are generally met with the same impatience and brushing aside. Says Horgan: one must serve a long apprenticeship with patience and humility and a willingness to learn. “I have never ceased being amazed at the almost unanimous expectation of students (graduate and undergraduate alike) who look to the publication and the success of the very first works they commit to paper.”