We've been discussing here why writers write and my pal Dan Castellaneta suggested I link to this video. It's 33 minutes of Rod Serling sitting around — year and location unknown — talking about writing with a group of students. I'm sometimes leery of getting too philosophical about the act of writing because such discussions often become just another excuse for not writing but I don't think this is that.
I have sometimes interacted with writers who were almost paralyzed by the belief that every single sentence that came out of their typewriters — even if those typewriters were computers or work in longhand — had to somehow transform the world. There's a little of that in this video but there are also enough pragmatic, useful points to make it worth any writer's time.
An older writer I knew used to dismiss Serling as being regarded as an important writer just because he got to host his show, not because of his scripts. But even if he got it for the wrong reason, Serling deserved his reputation. He was a smart man who wrote some very good things that have aced the ol' Test of Time. What he had to say is well worth hearing and maybe more than once…