Writers and other artists: endurability and tenacity, not just talent

“Tenacity has always been a primary theme in the lives of successful writers.” Rachel Simon

“As far as I can tell, the decisive factor is what I call endurability…” Ted Solotaroff

“Rejection lurks around every corner in the arts world…knowing how to tolerate, be with, and work with rejection is almost a career requirement!” Psychotherapist Mihaela Ivan Holtz

Author Dani Shapiro comments: “Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer’s main source of energy.”

Shapiro recalls “In the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student working on short stories and flirting with the idea of a novel, I came across an essay that was being passed around my circle of friends.

“It was titled ‘Writing in the Cold: The First Ten Years,’ and the author was the legendary editor and founder of New American Review, Ted Solotaroff.

“Ten years! In the cold! Solotaroff wondered where all the talented young writers he had known or published when he was first editing New American Review had gone.”

She quotes Ted Solotaroff from the essay:

“It doesn’t appear to be a matter of talent itself,” he wrote. “Some of the most natural writers, the ones who seemed to shake their prose or poetry out of their sleeves, are among the disappeared.”