What is it Like to be a Writer?

The bedtime story this past week was Boy, by Roald Dahl. The book consists of true stories from the author's childhood, which extends until he leaves home at the age of 20 to work for Shell Oil in Africa. During his late teens, while training at the Shell London home office, he spends two years as a commuting businessman. These are the only two years of his life that he does such a thing, and his comparison of those years to his final profession affected me much more strongly than Rose Red.

I began to realize how simple life could be if one had a regular routine to follow with fixed hours and a fixed salary and very little original thinking to do. The life of a writer is absolute hell compared with the life of a businessman. The writer has to force himself to go to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him. If he is a writer of fiction he lives in a world of fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not. Two hours of writing fiction leaves this particular writer absolutely drained. For those two hours he has been miles away, he has been somewhere else, in a different place with totally different people, and the effort of swimming back into normal surroundings is very great. It is almost a shock. The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith, hope and courage. A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom. He has no master except his own soul, and that, I am sure, is why he does it.

I don't even write any fiction, but this passage makes me want to.