I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. "There's nothing to writing," the columnist Red Smith once commented. "All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

Among these he mentions painters Edward Hopper and Rene Magritte. A. He credits his perennial teaching of certain novels to high school students with teaching him about "the scaffolding" of longer stories.

Wally Lamb (born October 17 1950) is an American author known as the writer of the novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True both of which were selected for Oprah's Book Club. He was the director of the Writing Center at Norwich Free Academy in Norwich from 1989 to 1998 and has taught Creative Writing in the English Department at the University of Connecticut.