Crime writer Walter Mosley told the Big Think: "The biggest misconception that people have about the literary life is the romance of it. That, you know, that a writer has this large world available to him or her of people, of ideas, of experiences, of interchange of ideas; that they don’t understand really, not how isolated the life of that person is because the life of that person is dependent on who they are, but the literary life of that person. How hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they’re reading when they’re talking to you about their books."
I think it's the same with any profession that has a bit of public profile--with writing, people think about the isolated moments that have some glamour associated with them: the book launch (if you're lucky), the good review (more luck), the royalty checks (yeah, much more luck...), maybe a movie option (huge amount of luck). But that's maybe 5% of what the job entails--and it IS a job, at least if you're counting on it to cover the rent. The other 95% is you sitting in front of a computer, or pacing, or spending an increasing amount of time online trying to get someone to mention your book.
Don't get me wrong, it's still the only thing I want to do, but Mosely was on to something. At the same time, I only mention this to writers; for non-writers it's much more likely that they'll buy your book if they've bought into the idea that your life is a nonstop whirl of literary parties inbetween which you dash off a book or two. So: shhh!
(For information on the writing life and how to make the most of it, see my book, "Your Writing Coach," published by Nicholas Brealey and available from Amazon and other oneline and offline booksellers.)
