“ The absolute, hardest part is convincing yourself that you have anything worth saying.” — Josh Spilker

While that may be true for beginning writers, it is not even a factor for me. I don’t give a damn if anyone judges my writing as worthy or not. I’m just going to keep churning it out.

The way I see it, the hardest thing about writing a novel is what happens when you’ve finished the novel, edited it and published it. The hardest thing is marketing it.

All those authors you mentioned — Faulkner, Morrison, Smith, Hemingway, Wharton, and Woolf — never had to think about marketing. Their publishers took care of that. All they had to do was write and appear at junkets and book-signings set up by their publishers.

Today that is all different. Today you cannot be a successful novelist without also being a successful marketer. You’ve got to spend as much or more time marketing than you do writing. The best writers are often not the best marketers and therefore their works of art sink into oblivion (just like some of the best posts on Medium).

The hardest part of being a novelist is focusing exclusively on that and not letting the lure of the dollar detract you from the writing. If you are thinking about whether or not anyone will like your writing or how you will market your novel or how much money you might make or whether or not you will win the Pullitzer Prize, then you are essentially screwing your novel and by extension yourself.

The hardest part of being a novelist is to shut off the incessant thinking going on in our noggins in order to become an empty vessel through which a novel can come through. What comes after that may seem even harder but it is not nearly as important.