Perseverance, Writing, and You

I really just want to do a post to honor all of you writers and your perseverance in writing, and blogging, and living life while learning how to balance it all.

Writing is not always easy, as you know. Writing a novel isn't just throwing words onto paper. It's getting the story out, tweaking, editing, rewriting, plotting, getting stuck, plotting some more, bouncing off of friends/family/support people, writing more, and finally, finally getting that last sentence written.

It's that moment of celebration--you wrote a book. You actually did it.

And then it's the editing. Lots of it. Personally, I often find the editing more exhausting than the writing--and sometimes it lasts a lot longer. There's the rewriting, the file sent off to beta readers/critique partners. There's getting the feedback, weighing it all carefully, and deciding what needs to be changed in the story. More editing. More rewriting. Wash, rinse, repeat. Send it to more betas. Get more feedback.

Then there's deciding what you want to do with it. Query letters, agents, publishers, self-publishing. Writing summaries and blurbs. Sending emails. Blogging. Tweeting.

When your book gets to publication, by whatever means chosen, there's marketing and other such things to think about.

Oh, and yes: there's deciding if this is the only book you want to write or if you have more you want to do.

Writing is different for everyone depending on life and circumstances. Writing can be finding time between school, work, exams. It's can be squeezing in writing in between homeschooling kids. It can be getting up early or staying up late. It can be lugging your laptop to your kids' Taekwondo or ballet classes. It can be hunching over a notebook in a coffee shop. It can be trying to work while not being distracted by shiny things on the internet. It can be a hundred other things that you have scheduled or the hundred unscheduled things that pop up.

It's a long, long process to write one book, and if you write more than one, the cycle continues.

But you persevere through it all. You plug on through computer crashes, through a file shutting down and not saving the last ten pages you wrote. You wrestle with those characters or that plot until you come out the other side--maybe with battle scars, but you come out and you get that next part of the book written.

Whether you are just starting to plot your first novel, or preparing your eighty-second book for publication: you are doing it. Don't forget to stop every now and then and remind yourself of what you are accomplishing. You're creating new worlds, breathing life into characters, filling pages with something that is important to you. You're learning and growing and shaping your craft.

And it's worth all of it.

For all of you sticking with your book(s) and riding the wild rollercoaster of plot, here is an award I made to celebrate what you are doing.