Tag: writers

Lessons I Learned Writing My First Book, Part 3: Perseverance

Seventy-eight, seventy-nine, eighty …

Do you like doing pushups? What about arm curls? Or squats?

Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty … eighty-seven …

They can take a lot out of you. How often have you been tempted to stop halfway through your exercise routine?

Ninety … ninety … ninety-FIVE … Ninety … SIX.

Or have you only gone as far as you could before the burn set in?

Ninety-NINE … ONE … HUNDRED.

Perseverance is when you keep going even when your body and mind don’t want to.

There’s an element of stubbornness in persistent people. They refuse to give up or go home when things are looking down, when the weather is cruddy, when they just want to curl up and sleep the afternoon away. Perseverance is the tenacious insistence on never leaving a task half-done.

Writers need to persevere. We need to never give up no matter the circumstances. How many books have been left half-finished, never to be read by others? How many books have never been written at all?

The most important thing, I’ve found, is to focus on the end goal. It’s easier (not easy, mind you, but certainly more bearable) to stick with it when you know how close you are to the end. And as I look back, I see how quickly that work time passed. Rather than focusing on present difficulties with drafting my book or stumbling over writer’s block, I quietly focused on the goal of finishing and publishing. It really does help.

Sometimes, I felt like I had nothing worthwhile to say, or that nothing I did say could measure up to other authors. What do you do during such times? You motor on. Perseverance is, quite simply, never giving up.

There’s a lot of books that will never be written. I take satisfaction in putting one more out into the world.

The gods and beings of ancient myth never went away. They just moved on with the times.

My book, A God Walks up to the Bar, is currently available on Amazon.com. Venture into the world of the Greek god Hermes, a world filled with demigods, vampires, nymphs, ogres, magic, and trickery. It’s a tough job, being a god!

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Lessons I Learned Writing My First Book, Part 2: Discipline

You’re running at a steady pace. You’ve been running for the past thirty minutes. Sweat streams down your back and drips from your brow onto your nose and neck. The marathon is halfway done. Only halfway. Your thoughts stray. You think of a cold glass of water. You think of resting – just for a moment – and catching your breath. Or maybe longer than a moment. You ran half a marathon. That’s good enough.

But you don’t stop. You keep running. You stumble and nearly trip. You regain your balance. You find your rhythm again and keep running. You feel out of breath. Now, the temptation to stop feels more like a necessity. Can’t finish the marathon if you can’t breathe. You feel like you’ll faint from exhaustion.

You remember your breathing exercises. You’ve trained for this. And you find your second wind. A burst of new energy propels you forward. You keep running. At last, you reach the end.

Marathons are a discipline. They take training, practice, and the determination to finish what you started. Writing is the same way. Crafting a book isn’t a quick sprint. It’s not a pole vault or long jump where you throw all of your strength into a few seconds of exertion. Writers must pace themselves and must be willing to get up every day, sit down at their computer, avoid the temptation to get hooked on Youtube or Facebook, and write their word count for the day.

For all that we exalt discipline and admire it in people, it’s not exactly the most well-practiced quality. We like people who accomplish great things: maybe build a skyscraper, or paint a masterpiece, or simply make a million bucks. We look at those people and we think how much patience and hard work must have gone into their achievements. We see the results of discipline, and think we should give it a go, but so many of us just can’t push ourselves. Why? Because discipline sucks.

Writing is a marathon
Runners at the start of the 2012 Borgess Half Marathon//Simon A. Thalmann//Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

It’s a slow-burning candle. It isn’t fancy and it isn’t glamorous. The results of discipline are glamorous. That fancy skyscraper, that painting, those million dollars. Wowee! I want that! But putting in the work is a pain.

Writing isn’t exactly a glamorous, exciting process either. Silently typing away at a computer doesn’t make for a great show. It’s not something you show off to others. “Look, Bob, watch me write my story! Isn’t it so cool?” Yeah, nobody’s going to care about the process. They want to see the end product.

Do you want to write? I mean really write, as a lifelong hobby or career? Do you envision yourself as a published author? That vision is the end result of discipline. You must train yourself to write on a schedule that works for you. Every day, every couple days, whatever you find works best. And then you must train yourself to be consistent about it. It’s not always pleasant, especially starting out, but it does get easier over time.

I have a day job. I had to find the time to write. Frequently, coming home from work, I didn’t want to. But I did it anyway. And the end result is, I wrote a book! I published it! I accomplished what I set out to do!

I don’t meant to scare away any of you potential writers out there. But writing can feel like a chore at times. Even so, when we set our minds to doing the things we love, we’ll make the time and effort to do them. But it does take dedication. Dreams are all well and good, but they’re nothing without action, and discipline demands action. Even a dream job has its drudgery, right?

And it’s sweeter in the end, to run toward your goal and finally reach it after a long, tiring run.

The gods and beings of ancient myth never went away. They just moved on with the times.

My book, A God Walks up to the Bar, is currently available on Amazon.com. Venture into the world of the Greek god Hermes, a world filled with demigods, vampires, nymphs, ogres, magic, and trickery. It’s a tough job, being a god!

Enjoying my blog? Don’t want to miss a single post? Subscribe for updates on when I post and follow my writing career, musings on fiction and storytelling, and reflections about life in general!