Dear Roxane: Seeking Creative Sustenance

An occasional advice column

Before you had the audience that you now do, what kept you going with your writing? I imagine it must be easier to sit down and write when you have a reasonable expectation that there are people who actually want to read your work. (But I also imagine I could be entirely wrong about that, and that maybe it’s just hard all the time for all of us, no matter what.) Before you earned your audience, before you had a book published or stories and essays accepted in journals and magazines, was it ever hard to keep showing up and practicing your craft? How did you keep believing in yourself and/or the act of writing itself enough to keep at it, if there was a time in your career when you faced more rejection? I ask this from the perspective of a tired mom with an MFA in fiction who thought maybe she would have more to show for her efforts by now, and sometimes finds it really hard to convince herself that sitting down in front of this old laptop, trying to get words on the page in between school dropoff and pickup is the best use of her time.

—Seeking Creative Sustenance