“What’s the difference between an amateur writer and a professional writer? How do you know if writing should be a hobby or part of your life’s work?”

Oddly enough what I think distinguishes a “real writer” from “someone who writes” is the ability and willingness to rewrite. I hate saying this because I hate revising my own work, but I swore I’d be honest and the truth is that revision is the hardest and most important part of getting a piece of work ready to be read.

Trust me: I hate reading what I’ve written. I want to run away from it; to leave it on the side of the road like a cigarette butt or banana peel or a bad blind date. I resist revision even more than I resist the blank page. It makes me nuts to look at a first draft and see how bad it is.

But I also know that it’s the only way that something gets better.

You need to be able to revise; you need to take criticism and work with it. Even harsh criticism. People in publishing are only really nice about the work of those they’re about to dismiss. If an editor begins with “You’re a truly gifted writer,” you know it’s a letter of rejection. The phrase, “You have talent” is always going to be followed with a “but.” That’s just the way it is.

When you hand someone something you love, something you’ve poured your heart into and the first thing they say is, “This is a good start,” your instinct might be to impale yourself on the nearest sword — after all you’ve just given somebody the best thing you’ve ever done, and they’ve told you that you might have made a good beginning — implying that you might have a long way to go.

The amateur will recoil and defend; the professional will take a deep breath and say, “What do you think I could do differently?”

Those are really hard words to say. When somebody looks at your favorite line and says, “This is over the top, you’ve got to get rid of it,” it’s very difficult to navigate the ensuing emotions: rage, despair, and bitterness. But getting rid of your best line, your favorite character, or what you consider to be your most perfect scene is usually excellent advice because these are the things that make you wince 10 years down the line. Like the outfit you loved when you were 13 which now appalls you, your favorite line doesn’t necessarily show your best judgment.

And I’m not a great believer in showing early work to other people unless they are your staunchest allies, unless you can trust them to say when something isn’t any good. I know that some writers argue that a writing group is the best thing that’s ever happened and that’s great. But you might want to keep your early versions to yourself if only because you might want to save your prose from somebody else’s vision until it’s fully formed, until it’s already taken shape in your head. Since a big part of writing is the process of revision, you might regret exposing this to light before it can survive under any kind of glare.

“How do you feel about books you’ve written after they’re done?”

I hate them for the first five years after publication; they make me wince. Then between five and 10 years after publication I think of all the ways I could make them better and am sorry that revisions are rarely encouraged once books are published, so it’s painful but not impossible to read them. After 10 years, I’m absolutely delighted.

Maybe the trick to enjoying your own work is living a long life.