Writer's Heaven

A writer died, and due to a bureaucratic snafu in the hereafter, she was allowed to choose her own fate: heaven or hell for all eternity. Being a very shrewd dead person, she asked St. Peter for a tour of both. The first stop was hell where she saw rows and rows of writers sitting chained to desks in a room as hot as a thousand suns. Fire licked the writers' fingers as they tried to work; demons whipped their backs with chains. Your general hell scene.
"Wow, this is awful," said the writer. "Let's see some heaven."
In a moment they were whisked to heaven and the writer saw rows and rows of writers chained to desks in a room hot as a thousand suns. Fire licked the writers' fingers as they tried to work; demons whipped their backs with chains. It looked and smelled even worse than hell.
"What gives, Pete?" the writer asked. "This is worse than hell!"
"Yes," St. Peter replied, "but here your work gets published."

There are some days when that scenario doesn't seem so far-fetched after all. And about the chain thing: I literally have to visualize chains around my ankles sometimes to keep myself seated at the computer to finish a chapter or even a page. But the joy of seeing our creations birthed and published must make it all worth it because we do it over and over again. Like Anna said, she loves her characters. She believes her reading public will love them too and so she will not give up when her babies are rejected.
Being a writer requires a lot of determination in many different areas: we have to be determined to research carefully, then write the story we see in our mind's eye so that others will catch our vision. We must be determined to see it through to the bitter end when there are so many other things we need or want to be doing instead. That is what drives a real writer: the determination - as the saying goes "come hell or high water" - to make our stories come to life for others.