There’s a lot of frustration in writing. I heard an interview with a writer not long ago in which the interviewer said, tell me, is writing difficult? And the writer said, oh, no…no, of course not. He said, “All you do is sit down at a typewriter, you put a page into it, and then you look at it until beads of blood appear on your forehead. That’s all there is to it.” There are days like that. But when you come away after two or three hours with a sentence, or two, or three and you understand in your heart that those are the best sentences you could have written in that time, there is a satisfaction to that that is like nothing else. That justifies everything.
I think that there are people who have a kind of intrinsic love of language. They’re born with it. It’s a gift of God, if you want. For those people, nothing is as gratifying as writing. In my experience, most people who have had that gift know it, and they celebrate it. I think Emily Dickinson knew absolutely that she had a great, great endowment, and that was her life. It is incidental that she only published five or seven poems in her lifetime. She knew she was a poet, and one of the best. That had to mean a great deal to her.