I over-indexed on the “make it to the end” motto, which meant pushing past a lot of my own instincts. I wrote a lot but lost the joy of writing.

In a recent interview for the BBC podcast Spark & Fire, the novelist Ann Patchett discusses some of the difficulties that come along with finding success as a writer. "It used to be a novel lived very nicely in my head as a constant companion," she explains. "As time goes on and I now have

Never put off till tomorrow what you can do now, especially if you’re holding back in the hope of doing it properly

There are so many things you’d rather be doing than what you ought to be doing and what happens is that you delay doing what you ought. All the evidence shows that this procrastination is bad…