It's easy to get published once you have written a really good book and the hard part, 99 percent of what you need to worry about, is really finishing it.
Oh, and one more thing: If I try something that I've never done before, something that's particularly difficult for me, and it doesn't work out, that doesn't make it a failure. The fact that I actually succeeded in finishing it makes it a huge success. Think of all the people who never even try.
The merit in action lies in finishing it to the end.
The hard part about writing a novel is finishing it.
[M]y first published book had just appeared in stores. The last year of my life-the year of finishing it, editing it, and seeing it through its various page-proof passes-ranks among the most unnerving of my young life. It has not felt good, or freeing. It has felt nerve-shreddingly disquieting. Publication simply allows one that much more to worry about. This cannot be said to aspiring writers often or sternly enough. Whatever they carry within themselves they believe publication cures will not, I can all but guarantee, be cured. You just wind up with new diseases.
I don't usually give out advice or recipes, but you must let the person looking at the photograph go some of the way to finishing it. You should offer them a seed that will grow and open up their minds.
The best part of all, the absolutely most delicious part, is finishing it and then doing it over I rewrite a lot, over and over again, so that it looks like I never did.
When I am finishing a picture, I hold some God-made object up to it
Sometimes you need to live with a painting for a while. Starting a painting can be easy, but finishing it. . . that's the skill of the painter, how you finally know when it's done.
