Perseverance and Writing

Sometime after I turned 30, the realization hit me that this is my life. I’d been waiting for something better to come along before I committed to anything. I always thought that if I was brave enough to take that first thoughtless leap, someone or something would be there to catch me and carry me to what I wanted. All I had to do was jump.

But life is not one blind step into the future. It’s a million tiny movements, and when you look up years later, you’re so far from where you started. You just have to keep moving.

I felt like I’d had a string of false starts. Projects that didn’t take off. Friendships that never caught on. Habits that never formed. What I realize now is that they were journeys I never continued. I expected each initial action not to just lead to the thing but to be the thing.

Where this is most relevant is in my writing career/hobby. (I don’t make enough money from it to consider it a career, but it’s the driving force in my life so it’s more than a hobby.) I have so many novels and ideas I’ve been passionate about for years but have never finished because I didn’t continue to put in the work. They stalled because I didn’t make as much progress as quickly as I wanted to. I grew frustrated with the pace of actual progress and settled for daydreaming about the stories and characters instead.

If I had just stuck with them, how much more would I have completed? How much better of a writer would I be by now?

In July of last year, I decided to write a first draft of a novel by hand. I started with a goal of 50,000 words for the month but when I couldn’t keep up the pace, I scaled my goal back to 30,000. I finished the month with 32,000 words written. What I was most proud of was that I wrote every single day.

I continued to write every day, but my progress slowed considerably. I added 15,000 words in August, but for the next three months, I added only about 5,000 words a month. But on November 30, I finished the story with 63,036 total words. I reached that by keeping my head in the story world, jotting down sometimes only one paragraph before falling asleep at night.

If I had known it would take me five times as long to write the draft as I had originally expected, I might not even have started. There have been so many projects I’ve dreamed of where I considered what a reasonable amount of words would be to write each day, but then I never started the project because I worried it would take too long finally to reach the end.

I often procrastinate because I worry I’ll be dissatisfied with the immediate results and not have the perseverance to continue. Or I’ll tell myself it’s okay to take a day off. I’ll promise to write twice as much the next day. Rather than doing that, though, I keep putting it off and the story never gets finished.

Writing is not a race. Every novel was written one sentence at a time, whether those sentences were written one a day over years or all in the course of a month. The key is to keep working.

I have several projects that have come to a standstill in the last few months. I’m going to commit a reasonable amount of time to these each day for the rest of the month to see how much I can accomplish. Fifteen or twenty minutes. That’s less time than it takes to watch an episode of a TV show.

Even if I think I have nothing to add, I can afford to spend fifteen minutes a day staring at a blank page or scrolling through my current draft. Something small will eventually spark a new idea, and I’ll fall in love with the characters all over again. That’s always how it happens for me; it’s about the characters. If I don’t tell their story, no one else will. They’re depending on me.