Tip o' the Week

I've been re-reading Emerson, cats & kittens, and this quote of his caught my attention over the weekend: "The way to write is to throw your body at the mark when your arrows are spent."

Writing is work, folks. More than that, writing is hard work, it's getting up early and staying up late, it's sacrificing doing other fun things to put another few hundred or thousand words to paper, it's spending money on printer ink and postage and conference fees when you'd rather spend it on mega sweet vacations, it's applying for fellowships and retreats when you'd rather be watching reality TV, it's spending time on your on-line platform or reviewing proofs or perfecting your backlist of e-titles on Amazon instead of hanging out with friends.

Writing requires commitment and discipline even more than it requires talent. The hungrier writer will outperform the more talented writer nine times out of ten. If you don't want to be a writer more than you want any other professional goal, odds are you aren't going to make it very far.

This isn't to say that writers don't have families or personal lives or other hobbies and interests; they have all these things. They simply want to be professional writers badly enough to put in the requisite time and effort to improve their craft and make the necessary connections. If you want to be a writer, you'd better be willing to put in all the work and jump through all the crazy hoops. If you want to be a writer, you have to be good enough and smart enough and dedicated enough. And you've got to be lucky as hell.

Nothing worth doing or learning comes easily, dear readers, but if that were the case, you wouldn't get any satisfaction from doing or learning those things. Keep working, keep reading, and keep writing, and your efforts are bound to pay off in some respect sooner or later.

Tomorrow: a lesson on special markets!