Peter Benchley, on writing

 If anything, my father discouraged me from becoming a writer. His father had been a writer and actor, Robert Benchley; he himself had been a reporter and a critic and was now a freelance writer, and he knew all too well how hard it was to make a living as a writer. He scratched for every dollar and was barely able to pay my tuitions. I worked at a more-or-less full-time job while I was at college, to earn my own walking-around money.

But once he saw that I was interested in writing, he did a wonderful thing. For two summers, when I was 15 and 16, he paid me the going wage I might make as a gardener or a soda jerk or a club attendant, and my only duty was to sit alone in a room with a typewriter for four hours every day, or until I produced a thousand words, whichever came first. He didn’t want to read it; I never had to do anything with it. But I had to produce it. He wanted me to experience both the solitude and the discipline that are requisites of a writing life, to see if I could tolerate them. If I couldn’t, he said, I’d better start looking in another direction.

As things turned out, I not only tolerated discipline and isolation, I liked them, and so, at the age of 17, I became half a professional writer: I say half because although I sent story after story to The New Yorker and other magazines, none of the stories sold. So I was a professional in that I wrote to make money, but I wasn’t a professional in that I never made any.