Yeah, you would-be writers out there…

How long are you willing to do the work, for little to no payout?

Two years? Three years? Seven years?

I hope the answer is that you would do it for free if you had to.

Understand: This is about answering the question: What kind of person do I want to be?

The truth is that nearly everything takes longer than you want it to.

Again – persistence wins.

I often, at my lectures, remind would-be writers that many of the novelists and short story writers, that most of the writers they now admire most had to write two or three unpublished efforts before they finally broke through. A look back at literary history suggests that this has long been the case.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)

The best part of a writer’s life is doing the work.

Why?

Because that’s why you started writing in the first place! For the way words and language made you feel.

I mean, sure. Maybe you find success, maybe you don’t.

But if being published is all you are after – the experience is bound to be flat.

It will feel flat for the same reason other successes feel flat too.

You write simply because you love writing, not for what it brings.

I had expected to be thrilled when I received my first copy of my first book, but when I opened the package and held the first copy in my hand, I found that I just felt sort of flat. There it was. I had made it into the ranks of the published, as I was to do about forty more times. But I felt no great surge of satisfaction. I learned then and have relearned many times since, that the best part of a writer’s life is actually doing it, making up characters, filling the blank page, creating scenes that readers in distant places might connect to. The thrill lies in the rush of sentences, the gradual arrival of characters who at once seem to have their own life. Faulkner said that he just listens to his own characters and writes down what they say. I watch mine, and try, like Conrad, to make the reader see what’s going on. You soon lose the sense, in writing fiction, that you yourself are making things happen.

-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)