On Writing Badly There is a horrible myth, one that has long persisted, that writing is a mystical occurrence, that the writer is visited by the beautiful muse and merely takes a sort of spiritual dictation. The implication is that if you are not putting forth best sellers in a meditative state, if you are actually struggling to get the right words on the page, you are not a “real” writer. Or maybe you’re a real writer, but you’re not a good one. This idea causes a lot of unnecessary grief and consternation. At keyboards from coast to coast, writers hover [...]