Encouragement from those established and talented.
I’ve just been reading the sample chapter from Cory Doctorows Complete Idiots Guide to Publishing Science Fiction. One quote in particular jumped out at me:
“The formula for a successful career is very simple: first of all, write. Secondly, finish what you write. Lastly, send your writing to editors. The rest of it — critics, websites, conventions, all of that — it’s window dressing. In your careers, you will be spat on, ground underfoot, ignored, ripped off, hated, and plotted against. Ignore it. Write, finish and send, and you’ll be bringing home a rocketship of your own some day.”
This is about the same advice you get in any field you want to progress significantly in: essentially persistence and resolution.
Robert Anton Wilson put it similarly, (Quoting Robert Heinlein)
“Robert Heinlein has offered the only pragmatic rules for writers that make sense to me. The first is to finish what you start. The second is to keep on sending each piece out until you sell it. If it has been rejected even 1 00 places, make a list of 100 more, and keep on mailing it to one after another, until you do sell it. If you enjoyed writing it, somebody somewhere is going to enjoy reading it and enjoy it enough to publish it. Since I learned this rule I have sold everything I have written, including even my Ph.D. dissertation, which is the hardest kind of thing to sell to a commercial publisher.”
- Robert Anton Wilson, Making it as a Writer
And of course, Terry Pratchett:
“Write. For more than three years I wrote more than 400 words every day. I mean, every calendar day. If for some reason, in those pre-portable days, I couldn’t get to a keyboard, I wrote hard the previous night and caught up the following day, and if it ever seemed that it was easy to do the average I upped the average. I also did a hell of a lot of editing afterwards but the point was there was something there to edit. I had a more than full-time job as well. I hate to say this, but most of the successful (well, okay… rich) authors I know seem to put ‘application’ around the top of the list of How-to-do-its. Tough but true.”
“Application? Well, it means… application. The single-minded ability to knuckle down and get on with it, as they say in Unseen University library.”
