If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.
Walk around my house and, in almost every room, you will find poems and quotes taped to cabinets and mirrors or contained in transparent plastic dollar store frames. The Samuel Johnson quote above hangs on the door of my bedroom closet. A glance at the frames on my desk offers the poems “Stanley Kunitz” by Mary Oliver, “Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert. Marge Piercy’s “For the Young Who Want to” is taped to the wooden surface. The bathroom mirror yields “The Poet Thinks About the Donkey,” also by Mary Oliver. There is nothing in the living room, but that could be because I don’t want my preoccupations to be obvious to folks as soon as they walk in the door. But if you make it to the kitchen, you will find Rilke’s “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” and Whitman’s “O Me! O Life!” taped to the cabinets. I need these reminders, this encouragement, because I am a very unlikely author.