We come in all kinds

If you’re an accountant, you do your job: you prepare a balance sheet, you make financial statements for a company, but that work is not tied up with the accountant’s internal thoughts and feelings. The balance sheet does not carry a small bit of the accountant’s soul with it. There is no place where the personality and beliefs of the accountant are incorporated into the work she produces and sends out into the world.

This is not the case for writers. Everything I write has a part of me attached to it. This is why rejection of a piece of writing or a bad critique of a book can be so painful. It is as if those are judgements of me as a person, or at least a part of me.