The giving up rant

This is my desktop picture today:
There. Now that we're all relaxed, I'm going to rant.

You know who bothers me? Who really, really pisses me off? People who say they want to be writers, but don't want to do the WORK.

I had a friend once who said she wanted to be a writer. In fact, she was working on a book, off and on. More off than on, but sometimes we all have periods in our life like that, right? That's okay as long as you are committed and get back to it, keep at it. But here's the thing I realized, after a while: she quit every time it got hard. Every time.

Writing is hard. When you first start out, it's like motherhood--no matter what everyone else tells you, you think, deep down, that it's going to be easy for YOU. Your child will sleep through the night from birth; your book will flow effortlessly from your fingertips. Same delusion.

There were times during the course of writing my book that I hated it. I hated that I spent every single lunch hour locked inside my office staring at the screen. I hated that I could spend 3 days on a scene, and then realize I had to throw it all out because it was crap. I hated that I had to revise, and revise, and revise, and revise again. This, all this, did not make me stop.

I credit much of the discipline I have to my early ballet training. From the ages of about 10 to 16 I danced at least 3 hours a day, every day except Sunday. From ballet I learned that you must practice past the point of exhaustion, over and over, to succeed--and that you will fail sometimes no matter how hard you try. Failure is a part of the process. The trick is that you keep going and try it again.

So it frustrates me when people stop at one failure, or even one difficulty. Writing IS like ballet--it's an art that must be learned and practiced. No one is born being good at ballet or writing. How can you be a writer, how can you even hope to achieve success in this very difficult, competitive field if you aren't willing to work, and learn, and be utterly committed to the process?

I wish that friend well, but I can tell you that she will not be a successful writer. Nor will the others I see who give up at the difficult places, who give in to the lure to go try another book instead of finishing this one, or "take a year off" when they get a rejection or two. You have to be driven to do this crazy business called writing. And you have to learn to never, never give up.

Medieval Word of the Day: awede: To become mad, furious, or frantic; to lose one's senses.