Time & Perspective Quote by James Lee Burke

Burke’s advice has the plain-spoken thrum of someone who’s spent decades at the desk and still doesn’t romanticize it. “A day at a time” isn’t a wellness slogan here; it’s a survival strategy. He’s stripping writing down to its smallest repeatable unit: show up, do the work, stop bargaining with the muse. The phrase carries a quiet rebuke to the fantasy that talent solves everything. Craft, for Burke, is less lightning bolt than long weather.

The most telling pivot is from making the thing (“write as well as you can”) to releasing it (“put it in the mail”). That mail image matters. It’s old-school, physical, irreversible. You can’t hover over an envelope the way you can hover over a draft folder. Burke is nudging writers out of perfectionism’s warm cave and into contact with the world, where editors can say no and readers can say nothing at all. “Leave it under submission” is a lesson in delayed gratification and ego management: your job is to keep circulating work while rejection does what rejection does.

Then the blunt commandment: “you never leave it at home.” On its face, it’s practical - always have the manuscript ready. Underneath, it’s an ethic. Don’t let your writing become a private identity project. Don’t protect it like a fragile secret. A writer, Burke implies, is defined less by what they could send than by what they actually risk sending, again and again, one day at a time.