"Хорошо, когда писателю хочется писать."
Translation:It is good when a writer wants to write.
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Because «хо́чется» is a subjectless verb, which works very much like «на́до». If you used «хо́чет», then «писа́тель» would be in the nominative case.
There's a very blurred line between treating the desire as something we can control, our action (therefore «я хо́чу») and as something that happens to us (therefore «мне хо́чется»).
Compare English 'I think' and 'it seems to me' (and archaic 'me thinks') — both mean roughly the same thing, but in the first case it's described as our action and in the second it's described as something that happens to us.
Speaking as a writer, writing is painful and awful and we never actually want to do it!
Why would it be incorrect to translate this as "It is good when a writer would like to write."
Yeah, this threw me off because i usually translate хочется as "would like" (to help tell it apart from хочеть) but actually got marked wrong this time. But i can kind of see your point how "when a writer would like to write" feels a little clunky versus the more natural "feels like writing"
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I feel like it would be clearer to say "это хорошо, когда...". Can a Native agree? I almost thought the sentence was "good, when the writer wants to write." Felt incomplete without это
это is a pronoun referring to a specific object, rather than a situation. For instance, to say "It is hot today" we don't say это жарко which might be interpreted more like "That (thing) is hot" but rather севодня жарко or even just жарко
Yes, хочеть is a little stronger and more direct, like a conscious want, like the writer has something on his mind that he has decided that he wants to write, whereas хочется would be more indirect, like he got motivation or the words are just coming to him. Subtle enough that in this case, either would work.
So I'd say it's more like "feels like writing" vs. "wants to write..." though as with a lot of dative and accusative in Russian, something's lost in translation to English. The flavor of being helpless is lost...
My answer was identical but marked incorrect - this has happened several times before
