Here, from playwright and actor Wallace Shawn, is a sentiment you might find … inconceivable.

When I think about my own case, I don’t think of writing as a professional skill. I think of it as an odd thing that I feel an impulse to do. You eat chocolate because you feel a desire to do it. You don’t develop a technique for doing it. You don’t get better at it. And I don’t want to think of writing as a skill I have that I habitually exercise according to a certain schedule of procedures. If it had to be that, I’d possibly feel that I’d rather not to it. Actually, I find the idea of writing as a professional skill somewhat sickening.

I’m not religious, but wouldn’t a religious person find something sickening about it if he were asked to think of meditation, prayer, or adoration of the universe as professionalized skills for which a method could be codified? I guess I am halfway between saying that writing is too personal, intimate, humiliating, and miniscule to discuss and saying it’s too sacred and vast to discuss. And I don’t like to think of it as a thing I do the same way again and again. Who says one instance of writing has anything in common with another instance?

(from an interview in The Paris Review #201)