I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness," the novelist Anita Broker 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.

Couldn't Keep it to Myself: Wally Lamb and the Women of York Correctional Institution