A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.
The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Substitute "damn" every time you're inclined to write "very"; your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.
One paradox of professional writing is that books written solely for money and/or acclaim will almost never be good enough to garner either.
I am in the Master of Professional Writing program teaching Humor Writing, Literary and Dramatic.
A lot of people, myself included, are excited about blogging and stuff like that, citizen journalism, but I do remind people that no matter how excited we are, there's no substitute for professional writing, no substitute for professional editing, and no substitute for professional fact-checking.
Three words that still have meaning, that I think we can apply to all professional writing, are discovery, originality, invention.The professional writer discovers some aspect of the world and invents out of the speech of his time some particularly apt and original way of putting it down on paper.
I used to love to write. As a child I used to write all the time. I loved to write up until the second I got my first professional writing job. It turns out it's not that I hate to write. I hate, simply, to work.
I suppose we think euphemistically that all writers write because they have something to say that is truthful and honest and pointed and important. And I suppose I subscribe to that, too. But God knows when I look back over thirty years of professional writing, I'm hard-pressed to come up with anything that's important. Some things are literate, some things are interesting, some things are classy, but very damn little is important.
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
My very first professional writing credit was on a movie called The Dunwich Horror, and Roger Corman was the executive producer.
or simply:
