Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Jon Williams

Williams frames authorship less as a career than as a condition: “never a choice” strips away the tidy narrative of vocation-as-brand and replaces it with inevitability. The line is doing quiet polemical work against a culture that treats writing as optional hustle, a side-gig identity you can toggle on and off if the market likes you back. By calling it “irresistible compulsion,” he insists the engine is internal, not managerial: the work happens because not doing it is intolerable.

The subtext is both romantic and defensive. Romantic, because compulsion flatters the myth of the driven artist who can’t help but make. Defensive, because it preempts a familiar kind of dismissal: why keep writing through rejection, low advances, shrinking attention, the algorithmic churn? Because the alternative isn’t leisure; it’s deprivation. “Compulsion” also sneaks in a hint of pathology, acknowledging that the impulse can be irrational, even self-sabotaging. That honesty matters in a profession where persistence is often fetishized but rarely examined.

Contextually, coming from a working science-fiction author who has navigated decades of industry shifts, the statement reads like a survival ethic. SF writers, especially, live with long feedback loops and fast-moving taste; you don’t last by waiting for permission. The phrasing makes a claim about legitimacy too: I didn’t choose this because it was glamorous or strategic; I’m here because the stories won’t leave me alone. That’s not just self-description. It’s a rebuke to gatekeepers and to the self, a way of making the grind feel morally and psychologically unavoidable.