By way of riemannia, Neil Gaiman’s answer to the writerly question, “When do you just give up?”
The following startled me a little, because it almost exactly echoes how I got started writing:
I think for me the tipping point was when I was a very young man. It was late at night, and I was lying in bed, and I thought, as I often thought, “I could be a writer. It’s what I want to be. I think it’s what I am.” And then I imagined myself in my eighties, possibly even on my deathbed, thinking that same thought, in a life when I’d never written anything. And I’d be an old man, with my life behind me, still telling myself I was really a writer — and I would never know if I was kidding myself or not.
In my case, I was in my early 20s, just out of college, with my own apartment and no commitments beyond my day job. And I knew how bad I was about procrastinating, so I figured I’d better get started now–because I knew failing would be far less painful than being 80 years old and thinking, “I wonder if I could have made something of this writing thing.” So I took what was left of my student loan money, bought myself a computer (no hard drive–just floppies!), and forced myself to find time every evening to write at least a line or two.
This rings very true, too:
As for giving up, well, sure, if you want to. Being a writer is a very peculiar sort of a job: it’s always you versus a blank sheet of paper (or a blank screen) and quite often the blank piece of paper wins. It has no job security of any kind, and depends mostly on whether or not you can, like Scheherazade, tell the stories each night that’ll keep you alive until tomorrow. There are undoubtedly hundreds of easier, less stressful, more straightforward jobs in the world. Personally, I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do, but that’s me.