Hard Work

Everything worth having is worth working hard for.

A cliché, it’s true, but as I like to say -- most clichés are there for a reason. And this one becomes less cliché the more that you really consider it in your own life.

Up until recently, I knew that it applied to getting in shape. After all, I’ve traveled this road before, put in all the hours of exercise and the months of counting calories. Only recently have I realized how true this is for being a successful writer too.

It’s no secret that becoming a successful writer takes a lot of hard work. And of course, that work involves writing: completing the necessary research and outlining, sitting down and making yourself write a terrible first draft, editing that into something beautiful that people want to read, being torn down, reworking parts – or the whole thing – until it finally becomes a well-crafted and whole piece. That’s all there is to writing, right? But the work doesn’t end there. There are so many more steps after the hard work of getting the words down on paper is done. Depending on your intentions for the piece, there’s finding reliable people to critique your work, locating competitions to enter it in, drafting a query letter, researching agents, marketing yourself. And don’t forget making time to keep writing every day, because the ideas don’t stop coming.

But as the saying goes – if it’s worth having, it’s worth working hard for. It’s what I have to tell myself when I struggle to find the time to balance everything in my life – this is what I want. I can’t let At Setting go by the wayside any longer. I have to work hard, first to complete the novel and then to find out what the next stages of its life will be – even if that means that it sits, unpublished but whole, on my hard drive.

Let the work begin.