Peter Trachtenberg

I find the only way I can write successfully is to treat it as a job, one I may not always love or even be that good at, but that I have to show up for. If home, as Frost wrote, is "the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” a job is the thing you have to show up for, even when you don’t want to.

... sometimes copy pages of a writer I love. I make my students copy 500 words of Primo Levi’s essay “Zinc.” I tell them that the only way to learn how to write a good sentence— a sentence that’s beautiful and truthful and startling— is to copy them, so that the rhythm of those sentences is propagated through the nerves and muscles and the microscopic pathways between the hand and the eye and the brain, with the heart about midway between.

Don’t write as a means to an end but rather as a thing in itself, the one thing you have to do, even if you never make a dime at it, even if nobody ever reads it, or nobody but your mom, though maybe not even her since what you write might shock her or hurt her feelings.

Treat your writing as a job and perform it faithfully and reliably, as though you were an aircraft controller, the only one in your city.

http://www.advicetowriters.com/interviews/2015/12/8/peter-trachtenberg.html