Take writing. Those who write for a living know that the popular image of the enraptured writer possessed by the power of the pen is a myth—that there is frequently little about writing that feels transcendent. Writing, like most other varieties of inventiveness, entails long stretches that are fairly boring: the careful collecting and sifting through of materials; the attempt to bring together disparate and at times even antagonistic sources; the act of dismembering conglomerates of ideas so as to detach a piece that is crucial for the endeavor; the endless decisions about what needs to be included and what must be excluded; the somewhat violent process of cutting through the expanse of one’s knowledge so as to highlight those elements—and only those elements—that advance the argument, intuition, or impression one wishes to communicate; the potentially paralyzing guesswork about how readers might react, what they might accept or reject; the painstaking attempts to build a bridge to minds that do not share one’s conceptual universe and that might consequently interpret a given point in a way that it was not intended; the moments of doubt when one loses faith in one’s ability to adequately rise to the occasion. And so on
M. Ruti - The Call of Character