I just read a New York Times op-ed by John Grisham about his work as a writer, and the other work he's done over the years. Grisham worked at a nursery watering flowers (been there, done that last summer...but it was actually a great experience for me), then worked laying chain link fence. His laboring continued as he took a job with a road construction crew laying asphalt in Mississippi. He decided that manual labor was not his calling, and tried selling underwear at Sears. Not so good either. The next logical step: the law, obviously. He spent years as a lawyer around his home county in Mississippi and eventually found himself in the state legislature. It wasn't until he sat in on a case involving a young girl who was murdered that he was inspired to create a story.
Grisham admits that writing was never a childhood dream, and he never felt a longing for the craft. "Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk," he says in this piece. He also makes it clear that out of all the jobs he's had over his lifetime, his writing is the hardest, but the most rewarding of them all. I admire his work (and his prolific career), and I understand his feelings about writing. I love writing, and even though I can't write fiction in any way close to Grisham, I love writing about my ideas, and crafting ideas and images out of words.
Grisham's op-ed can be found here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/opinion/06Grisham.htmlweeblylink_new_window