Successful artists and writers–perhaps you–make conflict-free habitual use of a dominant faculty in an art form. That is, if they are painters they wish to paint without interference–conflict free. They are confident. Hockey goalies need confidence. People in the arts need confidence just as much. They paint or write, they chisel in stone. They author books. They produce beautiful works and that is the ultimate goal of art–to add to the store of works that have beauty. Art and beauty are synonymous.
But to many artists and writers it isn’t so simple: they are paralyzed by flaws in their mind and spirit that they should beware of, but often aren’t.
The Seven Flaws
Lack of immediacy: Putting off something for another time–a time which may never come at all–and not doing what we know we should do creates a pattern of lazy self-indulgence. We pamper ourselves and lose vitality. We find easy excuses and don’t demand enough of ourselves. No one said art would be easy. If we would spend less time thinking of what we want to do and more time to what we should do, we would be much better off. Each day writers, painters, actors, and dancers who avoid taking necessary action are frittering away their artistic existence, never getting around with a clear mind to the fulfilled and happy life they might have lived.
Purposelessness: Sociologists have pointed to a world population that’s alienated and adrift without the solid foundation of something meaningful to believe in. Lack of a clear idea of what exactly you’re living for is a powerful obstacle. Creatives in the arts can find meaning in their work. They can believe in it with all their heart. They are adrift no longer. When you are unbending and pursue your craft with an iron will, obstacles lose strength.
Aimlessness and indecisiveness: Some creatives are decisive and aim high, but others float listlessly through life without self-direction. They might want to make the most of their creative lives, but they can’t catch hold. They aren’t able to achieve anything that matters. They don’t set their sights on anything in particular, or contribute anything. There are people on this earth who haven’t accomplished a single noteworthy thing. They squander their most valuable possession: their talents.
Difficulty solving problems: These people wake in the morning and there the problems are. They pull the blankets up at night and there the same problems are–unresolved. While they sleep their problems, like the dawn, impatiently await them. Then the perpetual cycle begins again–days pass, months pass, or years pass, and the problems are never solved. Just as important as problem-solving is problem-finding, identifying problems in our creative lives that hold us back which we would be better off not hiding from, but finally confronting and solving.
Regretting and Worrying: Some people in the arts I’ve known seemed to dwell on every mistake they ever made. And some moan about what the future might hold. When you are mired in regret you lose energy and peace of mind lamenting and bemoaning what has already happened.
When you worry you lose energy and peace of mind anticipating what might happen in the future. Either way you’re robbing yourself of the energy and peace of mind you need to make the most of your talent. Better to direct your attention away from what has happened or what may happen and to what is happening right now on the computer screen or on the canvas before you. Whenever your attention strays to yesterday or tomorrow, nudge it back to what is happening at the present moment. When it strays again, nudge it back to what must be done during this single irreplaceable moment of time.
Self-pity and griping: Animals don’t whine about their situation, but many people do, and it keeps them from many successes in their art. Self-pity–a dark, destructive mood that cloaks a creative person in gloominess—is an insidious inner obstacle that I wrote about in Fighting to Win. People who pity themselves believe that life has singled them out to be especially brutal to. They are enthralled with the negative. One self-pitying griper in a work team or at a party or in a room can depress the mood of the entire group. More than one relationship has ended because one partner was weary of the other person’s griping.
When you pity yourself you’re saying that obstacles have the better of you, your prospects are exhausted, and that you have no defenses left. The griper begins by griping about the little things and then graduates and gripes about almost everything–“This is all wrong, and that’s all wrong, and everything is all wrong.” Always griping they live a miserable, uncreative life.
Avoidance: Avoidance is giving in to that momentary resistance to doing what you know you should do. You know you should call him now, or go to see her, but when the time comes you don’t feel like it, so you don’t call and you don’t go to see her. You’re supposed to get up at 5:00 A.M. today and get a jump on your project, but that’s so inhumanly early and it’s still dark outside. So when the shrill alarm sounds you smack the snooze button. All of our lives boil down to momentary choices. Always rely on your best judgment in the moment. Your best judgment guides you to the best choices: trust it.
Every flaw is correctible. Once we are aware that flaws in ourselves that could sabotage our creativity do exist, we can set out to rid ourselves of them, beginning with taking action–doing something productive before another moment passes, not griping, not pitying yourself, not worrying, and not putting off. Then we will feel a burst of wellness in our minds and spirits.
© 2026 David J. Rogers
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Writing is a time-consuming process of self-discovery, self-awareness, and self-expression that may satisfy a writer’s deepest needs. Some writers find that nothing can compete with, nothing can replace, the writer’s joy of creating. Many writers so saturate themselves with their work that it becomes a need as strong as sleep, sometimes stronger. Many writers think, “This writing that I am doing is essential to my fulfillment and well-being. At times I may be so involved I will forget to eat. I will forget to make love. I will block out distractions. I will arrange a life-style and personal habits and routines to accommodate my writing.”
Some writers do consider writing the most important role in their life and give other roles short shrift. Many writers would agree with Katherine Anne Porter who said that the “thing” between her and writing was the strongest bond she had ever had—stronger than any bond she had ever had with any person or activity. 
Here it seems appropriate to talk about my Law of Give Up to Get. The Law of Give Up to Get means simply that to get something important in life, you must give up something else. Gripe all you want, rail at the gods, and wish it weren’t so, but you have no choice. In the long run, perhaps you can have everything you desire. But at any one time, to get A you’ll have to give up B. To get X you must give up Y, and maybe you might have to give up Z too. To write, you have no choice but to give up something else—maybe more than one thing. That’s a law, the way life works: to achieve this, you’ll have to give up that—time, energy and other resources spent doing other things, attaining other satisfactions.
Are there any roles in your life that can be supported with a smaller investment of time, energy, and other resources so that you can devote more time to writing? Are there any roles currently in your life you might dispense with?
Every memoirist, (as well as every writer of fiction and personal essays and every poet and playwright) should strive to make that attainable talent to evoke the past a part of their repertoire of skills. They can then call on that talent every day as they compose, and it will bring their writing vividly to life.
There were not enough living room chairs to go around when the full family came over, but there were the dining room chairs to carry in and also for an overflow crowd there were gray metal fold-up chairs stenciled on the back in white “Property of Ebenezer Baptist Church.” Aunt Sarah stored them in the hall closet hidden behind her prized full-length fur coat, and was embarrassed for strangers to see them, for fear they believe the impossible, but conceivable–that she had pilfered the chairs from that house of God.
On a kitchen wall, above the old serviceable stove, was fastened an Elgin clock that ran fast, forcing everyone to subtract twenty-two minutes a day if they wished for some reason to be accurate, and in the corner of the living room, close to the large drafty window fronting Austin Avenue, was an impressive century- old grandfather clock whose big bronze pendulum, to the entire family’s collective memory, had never moved.
The manuscript Golding submitted was worn, torn, and stained when Monteith first saw it. It had obviously been rejected by other publishers. Even Monteith agreed that this work of a public school teacher was over-written, disorganized, repetitive–a mess–and seemed never to get started. After many rejections Golding was losing hope of having the book published, of ever being published.
be recognized as a person with a talent that can generate revenue. When a writer is discovered by an agent or publisher, their life changes for the better. This post is about writers who were discovered, then published, and found success–perhaps more success than they expected. There are so many writers with all the talent in the world who are trying very hard to be discovered by an agent or publisher who is trying as hard to discover them. There is a good chance that many writers we read would never have been published had they not been discovered by the right agent and a right publisher.
Finally a small publisher picked it up. However, this editor who discovered the book, was different. He was enthusiastic and said to Harold, “Your book is going to be a best seller.” Finally what Harold had been hoping for: someone had faith in the book and its spiritual message. It became a phenomenal best -seller, the most popular book in the world, selling twenty -five million copies.
Persistent and confident in spite of failures, Jack London submitted his manuscripts hundreds of times to publishers that rejected the work before an editor discovered him. But after that, within a single year London, a self-educated writer, took the literary world by storm and was the most popular, most critically and financially successful novelist/short story writer in the world.
Invariably I would think, “All these incredibly talented performers I see–artists who are looking for a big break and are dying to be discovered.” Much like them, so many writers with so much talent also are trying very hard to be discovered. Without the people who discovered William Golding, Thomas Wolfe, Harold Kushner, or Jack London, would we have ever heard of those famous authors?
I was excited waking up at 3:00 A.M. yesterday, and I was not thinking of going back to sleep. I wanted to finish some poems where I had left off the night before. I thought, “Let my wife–a calmer, less excitable person–sleep; I 
Intense writers and artists do everything intensely–experiencing, feeling, thinking, and imagining. They are significantly different human beings from other writers and artists (and agents and family members and co-workers) who are not intense. They feel their emotions strongly. They soar high with elevated emotions, and they plunge into dark 
Intensity is a quality found in many creative people that facilitates artistic pursuits. Abbe Dimnet said that the creator’s intensity will be reflected in the quality of the work: “The experience of most artists is that the quality of their production is in keeping with the intensity of their wish.” Henry James wrote: “It is art that makes life, makes intensity, makes importance.” Horace said, “Painters and poets alike have always had license to dare anything.” It is their intensity that gives them strength. Keats said, “The excellency of every art is its intensity “ A problem every writer and artist faces is maintaining in every phase of their story or painting the intensity that keeps it going and energizes the creator’s every gesture and the work’s every detail. They must be able to generate and sustain intensity as they work.
Who could be more intense than poet Walt Whitman who expressed a wish to have “one hour of madness and joy,” “to feed the remainder of life with one hour of fullness and freedom,” “To have the feeling today or any day I am sufficient as I am.” Who more intense than novelists Charles Dickens with his phenomenal storehouse of drive that enabled him to work on a multiplicity of books, speeches, plays, travels, and social projects at the same time without ever tiring?
If you are to be a writer who will be recognized, you must have faith that you have been created to be a writer, that writing is a destiny toward which your life has been aimed. Virginia Wolf and Toni Morison felt that way, and James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, and Ernest Hemingway. Many writers we haven’t heard of yet, but will, also feel that way. The faith that you are fated to be a writer is a writer’s first requirement. You must believe that it is when you are writing that you’re doing what you were brought into the world to do.
History shows that writers who will amount to anything also all have an attitude of “seriousness” about their work and their lives: “This is my only life; I am not playing games. I try to write every day. I strive to get better and better still and will do that all my life.”
As a writer you must be true to your awesome potential–must be in fact what you are potentially. If you are not doing enough with your gifts, your conscience lets you know. The conscience of a writer asks, “Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? Have I become what I should have become? If I have not become what I should have become, what will I do now?” Your writer’s conscience is the voice that calls you to be the person you are fully prepared to be, the uniquely talented writer you have been created to be.
Whether you find creative people in remote little mountain kingdoms accessible only by mule or in big, modern, cosmopolitan cities, you will discover that they are surprisingly alike. The many traits they share are not all favorable; some are obstacles. Yet those traits–the worst and the best together–prepare creative people for fascinating lives other people look at with admiration and envy.
May be “overlooked” as school children. Their talents unrecognized, they may have undistinguished elementary and high school careers, only to be recognized for their significant achievements later in life to the surprise of everyone.
Sadly, at times may be too emotionally ill to work, particularly poets and writers who may be victims of the high and inexplicable incidence of debilitating 
Have an insatiable need to 
“Know who they are.” Are marked by a clear, unambiguous sense of identity, as “I am an historical novelist specializing in women’s roles in England during the Victorian era.”
Can be playful, child-like, humorous, silly, fun to be with, and seem younger than their age.
Benefit from a rare a
For survival must become skilled at overcoming obstacles, of which there are many in the arts.
or accurate. They are not interesting. Because of an inadequate handling of places, a work that may be superb in every other respect is without convincingly-described locations, scenes, and settings. Descriptions of places are not window dressing that a writer need pay little attention to, but a feature of writing fiction, nonfiction, and drama that is indispensable. Poorly written descriptions of places detract from the quality of the written piece.
Award-winning short story specialist Eudora Welty did more than anyone else to point out how central to effective fiction place is. She said that the story’s place affects “all currents” of the work, all of its emotions, beliefs, and moral convictions that “charge out from the story” as the author unfolds it. She said the places should always be identified, and adds that they should be described in a particular way that requires significant writing skills.
Place has been particularly important to some noted authors. You cannot imagine the story’s characters without the place where the author has put them: Dublin to James Joyce, small town and rural Mississippi to Eudora Welty and William Faulkner, Paris, Spain, and Africa to Ernest Hemingway, Camden, Ohio to Sherwood Anderson, southern United States to Truman Capote, James Agee, Reynolds Price, Pat Conroy, and many other “Southern writers,“ the plains of Nebraska to Willa Cather, Chicago to Saul Bellow, the Mississippi River to Mark Twain, the English moors to Charlotte Bronte and sister Emily, eighteenth century London to Charles Dickens, Mexico and the state of Texas to Katherine Anne Porter, Los Angeles to mystery writer Raymond Chandler, and so on.
(My father was an air raid warden during World War II, and once he took me with him during an air raid practice when the lights of the city were turned off and the skies were filled with search lights) “My father and I turned and came up behind the church where a delivery truck was parked. We walked down the alley, keeping our eyes trained on the apartment buildings’ windows, past the empty lot overgrown with weeds and covered with tin cans and newspapers, and past the bent-in-half, arthritic and reclusive witch’s bleak house. Her ferociously unfriendly German shepherds were oddly quiet. We passed the drowsy homes and apartment buildings of neighbors, only some of whose names we knew. Behind the walls of those buildings were people not unlike us, simple people, all with the stories of their lives never to be written. All shades were drawn, and so the night was perfect, with no more reminders necessary.
and a full moon dangled in the sky. On the back porches in neat array, like miniature glass sentinels, stood the empty bottles left out for the milk man. Branches of trees laden with rain bent low over back fences like old women on canes. When the wind blew, the leaves showered the two of us with water, and we laughed. On the ground lay deep puddles that we had no choice but to step through, which was fine with me because I was wearing boots. My father’s shoes made squishing sounds and he said,” Another pair down the drain” and we laughed at that, and I splashed through, heavy-footed.”
swings. The night had taken on an indefinable splendor and given me a feeling of exquisite peace that I hadn’t felt since childhood. I saw a white yacht that was illuminated by deck lights out on the lake. Small waves rocked a rowboat that was not very far from me. With a whoosh, waves tumbled over themselves onto a beach. A bell chimed somewhere on the water. There was a splash and then another. The vivacious woman I was with took off her shirt and bra and swung them over her head like a lasso. She said, “Guess what I do for a living.” I said, “I’ll bet you four million dollars that you are an actress.”
Old cars with dented fenders and gaudy garters dangling on their rear-view mirrors and pick-up trucks with rifle racks cradling ominous shotguns and carbines were parked four deep in the lot. When the door of the Inn swung open, muscular men, their shirt sleeves rolled up above the bicep, sauntered out arrogantly, their arms tight around the waists of conspicuously made-up women, their heads thrown back in exaltation and abandon, and the chime of laughter spilled into the night like flowing wine.”
Excellent writers should be able to describe places that they have experienced or have heard or read about and can clearly envision as they compose. They should be able to create vivid descriptions that enliven the text and appeal to the reader’s senses.
davidjrogersftw 
Why Are So Many Talented Writers Unsuccessful?
I’m assuming that you have a writing talent, and that you may even have been the most talented in your class, in your school, and now are the
most talented in your writers’ group, most talented in your home town. That’s something to be proud of. But talent alone isn’t enough to make you a highly successful writer in the competitive field of creative writing in which almost everyone is talented, everyone gifted, and everyone exceptional.
But there are qualities other than talent that will determine how successful, fulfilling, and happy your writing career will be in that competitive world of very talented people. That hard-to-define stuff called talent is just one of the many requirements of the writer who excels. If you are relying solely on the talent you were born with to bring you writing success and happiness you are making a mistake.
Poet John Berryman thought that talent was no more than 20% of a successful poet’s personality, and why shouldn’t the same may be true of novelists, dramatists, screen writers, and essayists? What I’m asking is, “What comprises the eighty percent of a writer’s personality that blended with natural talent brings about success?”
To that question there are innumerable possible answers. According to writers, teachers, critics, and researchers other factors that are important are:
Endurance/ Persistence
Novelist Kurt Vonnegut said that talent was extremely common, but what is rare is endurance, the willingness to endure the sometimes difficult and trying life of the writer. Many writers have come to the conclusion that sheer old-fashioned day-by-day doggedness is the key to writers’ success. In the book The Courage to Write, Ralph Keyes says, “Success as a writer is within the grasp of whoever can tell a story on paper that people want to hear and is willing to persevere, to put up with boredom, frustration, and anxiety. Determined writers will find ways to get published regardless of whether they are brilliant or have a degree from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.”
Passion, Intensity, Obsessiveness, Willpower, and Patience
Among the personal qualities that cause motivation strong enough to sustain a writer through the inevitable trials, disappointments, setbacks, and self-doubts are those that are not luxuries but necessities for any writer who is in any way serious about writing: passion, intensity, obsessiveness, willpower, and patience. Gertrude Stein said that all of a writer’s work comes out of a passion as a powerful force, and added that if you really have that passion you aren’t able to recognize it because you don’t know what it is to feel any differently. Many people with obsessive compulsiveness–including writers I’ve known–are especially productive not despite that affliction but because of it.
Hard Work, Commitment, and the Hunger for Success
Writing teachers are generally in agreement that it’s not the best, most talented students whose names they see in print in later years, but the hardest workers and the hungriest for success. The students with the most talent but the weakest work ethic who dazzled the class disappear into oblivion, while the hard workers often go on to great achievements. Many prodigiously gifted but poorly motivated people do not end up where gifted people belong: in the upper echelons of their field. Without pursuing all your goals with clear-mindedness, confidence, and commitment over years, you’ll probably quit after repeated failure.
Every writer, as every artist and every actor, who experiences minimal success eventually asks “Should I quit?” or lowers their ambitions. Writers who have achieved a high level of excellence and success are not satisfied to reach merely an acceptable level of performance, but are motivated to pursue increasingly higher goals.
Example of Pursing Increasingly Higher Creative Goals: Frank Loesser
Self-Confidence and The Need to do Your Best
Those who are sure of themselves intensify their efforts when they don’t reach their goal. Studies of high-performers in all the arts show that they are all universally alike: over and over again they are people who believe in trying to excel, in doing one’s best, in working very hard and spending time constructively. They are intensely attracted to their field from their first exposure to it and all through their efforts to develop their skills and their “reach.” In fact, if you have an intense interest in a creative field, that in itself is almost always a sign that you have a natural talent in it.
The Effect of Passing Comments
Talent can be ignited at any time. The cause of motivation to write a 300 page book or continue on the writer’s life path may be nothing more than a passing comment. Simply being told by someone else or telling yourself that you can achieve much more through trying harder will get most people to try harder. Just being told that they are talented is often enough to start people off to develop that talent.
An Analogy
Talent in writing will not bring success unless it is supplemented by other human qualities. Without endurance, determination, intensity, passion for writing, obsessiveness, will power, hard work, commitment, hunger for success, and self-confidence a writer would be analogous to an automobile–beautiful, streamlined, expertly designed–but lacking an engine.
© 2023 David J. Rogers
For my interview from the international teleconference with Ben Dean about Fighting to Win, click the following link:
Order Fighting to Win: Samurai Techniques for Your Work and Life eBook by David J. Rogers
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Filed under Confidence, Developing Talent, Human Potential and Achievement, High Achievement, Intensity, Persistence, Success, Willpower, Writers, Writers' Characteristics
Tagged as Frank Loesser, Gertrude Stein, John Berryman, Kurt Vonnegut, passing comments, Ralph Keyes