"It's A Short Walk From The Hallelujah To The Hoot." ~Nabokov

"An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn't know why they choose him and he's usually too busy to wonder why."
~William Faulkner

One of my dad's favorite anecdotes has to do with one of the first times he had writer's block. The real kind. The kind that allegedly forced John Cheever to attach a metal chain from his ankle to his writing desk, give his wife the key, and make her promise never to use it until he finished what he needed to finish. So my dad went to an attractive female therapist his friend had promised would, if not solve his problem, at least provide Kathryn Grayson-style arousement. He explained the writer's block. Ten minutes into the session, she said to him,

"What you do is very hard."

My dad pursed his lips, stood up, handed her a check, and walked out. That sentence is now scribbled on a decades-old yellow Post-It taped to his laptop.

"The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have a mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a bunch of happy chuckleheads."
~William Styron, 1958