Daily reminder that the vast majority of writers lead lonely and boring lives and that you will not be experiencing a full life if you devote yourself to this craft. You will be spending your time reading and writing instead of trying to experience the world, to meet people and bond or conflict with them, to learn as much as you can about the real inner workings of the world. Sure, you will experience the world, but you will be constantly retreating from it. And even when you are experiencing the world, you will be often analyzing it for writing material, from the point of view of a writer, and so you will always be detached from it. If you have never felt the detachment of a writer, then you are not a true writer.
“To write is to forget. Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life. Music soothes, the visual arts exhilarate, the performing arts entertain. Literature, however, retreats from life by turning it into slumber. The other arts make no such retreat...”
- Pessoa
>inb4 mentioning an author with massive balls who lived an exciting life
These people are the exceptions, obviously, and have more balls than you ever will, so stop trying to make excuses. You will not be the next Hemingway or Hunter S. Thompson. Who both, incidentally, killed themselves.
“Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if he is a good enough writer he must face eternity, or the lack of it, each day.”
- Hemingway
>inb4 writing only takes up a certain portion of your day, so you have so much other time to do whatever you want
If you do not devote yourself to your craft they way the best writers do, then you will be writing trash and are not fit to call yourself a writer. Don't act like you don't have to work ridiculously hard to create a great work of art. The best writers, like Joyce, are the ones that devote themselves to writing the most.
“The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one...Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness, all, to get the book written.”
- Faulkner
Art is beautiful and important, the but the life of the writer is not a beautiful or important one aside from the art he creates. To want to be a writer, to live the life of a writer, you must be a sort of masochist, or must be so consumed by your passion as to see no other possible route for yourself. The life of a true writer is not a good one, and may not even be so romantically and aesthetically terrible as to make up for its horridness.
“What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? the human shambles that follows it around. What's left of the man when the work's done but a shambles of apology?”
- William Gaddis