Elizabeth Cosin's Advice for Young Writers

I highly recommend reading Elizabeth's Cosin's inspiring interview with Neely Swanson at* No Meaner Place. Here's an excerpt:

It doesn’t matter what anybody says or how much work there is or who gets gigs on the Who You Know circuit or who the best unemployed writer or unpublished script is. It doesn’t matter. None of it does. What matters, what always will matter now and forever, is the work.

And not just any work but your work. What matters is if you are one of those people who are hard-wired to write then write you must do, no matter if it pays the bills or not. No matter what anyone tells you. No matter the prospects of getting paid or published or even printed on glossy white 3-hole punch paper. No matter what, period.

Because if you are one of those poor suckers, you already know the gospel by heart. You ain’t in it for the money. Only a fool becomes a writer to get rich. You’re in it because you’re in it and there’s no way out of it. You’re here because you have no choice, because there are forces at work well beyond your control that compel you to turn that glob of gray between your ears into words and sentences, paragraphs and chapters, dialogue, scenes, acts, to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard or blood to stone. Because you have no fucking choice.

If it’s in you, you know. And if you know, then you don’t need anybody to tell you that you’ve just turned on to an endless two-lane between the voices in your head and those voices on paper making any kind of sense, the latter so far out on the horizon, you can’t be sure if it’s home or a thousand-foot death drop off a cliff.

I’ll tell you what you say to that young kid just starting out or to the reflection in your mirror on those days when you’re certain you’ve either written your last good word or the last word of yours anybody will ever read. You remind that kid (and you) that nothing will ever matter more than the work, that on this crazy, winding, frightening, amazing, wondrous, magical and sometimes fucked up ride that for sure has been chosen for us and not vice versa, the only thing you’ll ever have any control over is your craft. And nobody can take that away from you. Not if you don’t let them.

*When referring to blogs, is it "at" or "on" or "in?" Someone please enlighten me.