another word

From the foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:
"Douglas Adams did not enjoy writing, and he enjoyed it less as time went on.  He was a bestselling, acclaimed, and much-loved novelist who had not set out to be a novelist, and who took little joy in the process of crafting novels."

From Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, regarding Robert Towne (who wrote classics such as Chinatown):
"Towne had two weaknesses.  He was poor at structure, a serious problem for a writer who would become notorious for his windy, 250-page scripts.  And for all his facility with words, he was not a born storyteller.  He had difficulty imagining the simplest plots, the most rudimentary sequence of events.  He was anguished over what he felt was his poverty of imagination."

You know, one of the ways I stop myself on some of my side projects is by thinking I don't have a grip on what I'm doing yet.  I imagine other successful people as knowing exactly what they're doing, not as people who are struggling. 

However, as artists, as creators, we must all be on the edge of human experience, right?  Working in the unknown.  Creating something nobody has seen.  It's going to be a struggle.  Only later might others look and go, yeah, that makes sense.

As always, it takes a ton of persistence, which is another word for being stubborn.