"...Sure, sometimes the hard work seems like nothing and 11-hour sessions fly by. But other times everything seems unnecessarily hard and it's a bit of a slog. People can underestimate that...."

I'd argue that the ONLY people who are 'artists' are the ones who do the slog.

ANYONE can do an 11-hour session and get in flow and have that moment of epicness. In fact, MOST people have this, at some point, when doing something.

But, that's the easy part.

The hard part is taking that garbage output from the 11-hour marathon, and turning it into something useful/valuable that anyone-but-you would want to consume.

As a writer, this process is particularly vivid. I've written 15k words in a day. It was mind-blowing.

But none of that was comprehensible to someone outside of my head.

That's where editing comes in. Of those 15k words, probably only 3k survived after editing, and the rest became a rough 30-point outline. All those other words were deleted.

Same with music.

Great! You spent 11 hours bashing out something. But if you don't spend another 4-5 hours on mastering, it will be unlistenable to anyone but yourself; a curio they might listen to 30 seconds of before turning it off and saying, "Yeah. I can hear something in that. I'd love to hear it when it is done!"

That second step? The editing? The mastering? That's the defining line between an artist and everyone else. That's what stops most people: the work.

The third step is then being creative for an 11-hour session when you don't want to. When you get up in the morning - every single morning - and write for 4 hours, even when there is nothing in your brain. When your fingers hurt. When you are tired. When your tools are failing you, and you need to switch to a typewriter, or ukulele, to write, instead of your usual computer.

Those are the artists I respect the most. The ones who do the work.