Anthony Trollope worked a long, successful career as a postman at the British postal service while moonlighting as a novelist. Before he’d punch into work, he would hole up at his writing desk and blacken a set number of pages.

Once on the clock, he would find himself on lengthy train rides throughout Ireland and later England to fulfill his postal duties. During these arduous commutes he would blacked some more pages.

Trollope adored his work as a postman (despite his burgeoning notoriety as a novelist) and so he kept clocking in and out at the British postal service long after his novels grew popular enough to support him.

When Trollope passed on at the age of 67, he died one of the most prolific novelists of all time, churning out dozens and dozens of novels over the course of his multi-decade long career.

After his death, his autobiography came out, divulging that his prolificness wasn’t the result of some God-given talent but rather an uncanny regimented writing schedule.

Literary critics would later say Trollope revealing how the sausage was made was blasphemy to his legacy. His readers wanted desperately to believe that Trollope was a God walking around men.

While Trollope was still alive and kicking, one of his neighbors wrote him in need of guidance. Apparently, her husband had decided to try his hand at “writing for money” and she wanted to know the secret.

Here’s how Trollope responded to her naivity…

“

My belief of book writing is much the same as my belief as to shoemaking. The man who will work the hardest at it, and will work with the most honest purpose, will work the best. All trades are now uphill work, & require a man to suffer much disappointment, and this trade more almost than any other. I was at it for years & wrote ten volumes before I made a shilling –, I say all this, which is very much in the guise of a sermon, because I must endeavor to make you understand that a man or woman must learn the tricks of his trade before he [or she] can make money by writing.

”

I think what was so offensive about Trollope’s writing process was that it put all of his readers on the hook… so to speak.

If Trollope, an ordinary man, was able to churn out a series of breath-taking novels while working a full-time job as a postman, then it meant that they too were capable of doing more with their lives.

Trollope’s writing process, his hard-hat mentality around creativity and his legacy has served as a reminder to us all that there are no excuses.

You either find the time to do the work you love.

Or, you don’t.

By Cole Schafer.

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