I thought this was a great blog post, so I’m sharing. 
There is a lot of wisdom here, but my favorite has to be this…
I’ve been to all sorts of different writing workshops over the years. I’ll probably go to more in the future. I like being around people who care about writing, and I love talking shop. But when I started going to workshops, and at first when I was an undergraduate in NYU’s Dramatic Writing Program, I thought workshops would teach me The Secret. I’d read the writing guides — heck, I’d memorized them! — and I hadn’t learned what The Secret was, so I figured it must be kept by the teachers of writing workshops.
Here’s The Secret: There is no Secret.
I really learned that when one of my NYU teachers, a wonderful writer himself and a marvelous teacher, asked me how I wrote so consistently. I was flabbergasted. “Practice?” I said sheepishly. “I thought so,” he said, apparently disappointed. He thought I’d found The Secret and could tell it to him.
We have all been like this at some point or another and I think most of us at some point face the horrible fact that there is no “secret”, there is no easy way through writing. You just have to do it and do it some more and it honestly doesn’t get any easier at all. In fact, it gets harder–you know more, more people actually read what you write and more people comment on it. This is not a whine, just a statement of fact that we all have to face. So, we really want to write and stay sane, we have to just pull the chair up to the laptop and get on with it.
