Are you a writer or an author?

Here’s something from author Elizabeth George about writing:

“Lots of people want to have written; they don’t want to write.  In other words, they want to see their name on the front cover of a book and their grinning picture on the back. But this is what comes at the end of the job, not at the beginning. To reach that end, you have to be willing just to set it aside, knowing that it may never happen at all but not much caring because it’s the writing that matters to you; it’s the mystery and the magic of putting words on paper that are truly important. If you don’t feel this way, then you want to be an author, not a writer.

Authors are those guys who hope to get rich quick with a big sale to a big publisher followed by a lucrative movie deal. They write the same novel over and over and they declare at the beginning of their careers that if they don’t get published, they’ll give it up.

Writers, on the other hand, are those guys who’d write anyway. They have to breathe, after all. They have to live.”