Y’all.
The writing journey is a long, arduous process fraught with snares and many, many hours of tears. Blood, sweat, and tears. The writer sits at a keyboard for hours and pours out her heart and soul into a series of stories. She gives her everything to make them come alive.
And she doesn’t even know if anyone will want to read them.
Some days it can seem like no one out there cares at all. Like no one will ever like your writing. Or read one of your books and say “I want to write like that one day.” Or internet stalk every blog post or interview you’ve ever done. It can be hard to believe that’s even a possibility.
Some days you write until your fingers hurt and that troublesome bug bite on your wrist itches like crazy, just so you can look over what you put down on paper and know that those two characters may be fighting now, but they’re going to be crazy happy together later.
Some days it’s drudgery to type each letter, to put them in a line and form a word, and to put words in a line to form sentences, and to put sentences in a line to form paragraphs. You don’t feel it, but you know you have to keep pressing on.
All for the sake of a story.
You see, writers do one very important thing day in and day out. We write.
Rainer Maria Rilke said it so beautifully in “Letters to a Young Poet”
“If, when you wake up in the morning, you can think of nothing but writing . . . then you are a writer.”
Dreams can become reality, but the journey is a huge part of that. If you don’t press through, how are you going to know just how close to your life goals you were? You don’t know when that wall will give out and someone will show your work to just the right person. You only see a little bit in front of yourself.
Never. Give. Up.
Three words that will always follow me when I sit down to write and when I have to search for paper to write down that stellar new idea. Someone once asked what the most important thing is for a writer, and in one word I decisively answered. Perseverance.
Do you have it?
The Write Knowledge 