My son turned 17 earlier this month and this week, he finally got his driver’s license. It has been a story of perseverance and patience.
COVID meant a cancellation in driver’s ed classes that pivoted to virtual with a backlog of folks on the wait list to get into a class. When he was finally called up, the one virtual time option offered conflicted with an extracurricular activity that was more important to him. So we had to wait another round. When he finally finished the classroom portion, it was an interminable wait to get the in-car instruction because the normal 3:1 student to instructor ratio had been whittled down to 1:1. Even once that was accomplished, the wait for appointments at our local DMV to get his permit proved a challenge. Once his permit was secured, he then had to log his 60 supervised driving hours. Once he ticked off his nine months and 60 hours of permitted driving, we re-entered the DMV circle of hell where appointments are booking three months out at the earliest and walk-in waits are ridiculous (we spent 3 hours outside the DMV last Friday and never made it inside the lobby to check in before we were sent home by overworked but polite workers who said there was no way we’d make it to the front of the line before close).
BUT, thanks to persistence (spending several hours throughout the weekend trolling the DMV site for cancelled appointments anywhere within a two-hour radius of us), my husband scored an appointment an hour away and, after a test that took ten minutes, he is now a licensed driver.
Yes, it’s a full year after he was age-eligible. Yes, it has been an annoyance and an impediment to this teenage rite of passage. But he was pragmatic and patient and just kept doing what he needed to do and eventually was rewarded.
It reminds me of our work as writers. Each part of the process–ideating, drafting, editing, revising, polishing, querying, submission, revising again, marketing, publishing–is its own tedious process. Just like driver’s ed class, in-car driving, taking the permit test, logging the appropriate in-car hours, finding the appointment, taking the driving test, filling out the paper work, etc… was a part of my son’s licensing process.
“Do you have your license yet?” feels eerily similar to “When will we see your book on the shelf?” A well-meaning question by a loved one who also doesn’t really understand or care about the process that gets someone to either end result. It’s the paper we’re after whether we’re a teen wanting that tiny rectangle of freedom or a writer who wants to hold a physical representation of the story that’s lived in their heads for years.
So how do we keep persevering as writers?
We ideate. We write. We edit. We revise. We polish. We query. We submit. We revise again. We market. We promote.
We do the work. We break it down into chunks. We celebrate each accomplishment along the way because no one else will. No one is waiting with a balloon and confetti when you’ve finished your filter word search edit phase (although they should because that accomplishment, my friend, deserves a ticker tape parade) or sent out you’re 37th query letter.
We remind ourselves that creating is part of our DNA. That the story we are telling is important or we wouldn’t have started telling it. We take a step back and breathe and remember that this is a marathon and not a sprint. And in some extreme cases, we reflect on whether we write for the goal of publishing or write for our own creative fulfillment. There may be some of us who are content to give up the publishing ghost and others who would write whether anyone else reads their words or not. Both are fine as is anything in between. When you find yourself frustrated, however, it’s important to know where you are on that spectrum to know how to handle what happens next.
I’ve been there. Shoot, I am there. The goals I had set for myself were to be published before now. But that’s not in my control, just like my kid getting his license when he turned 16 ended up not being in his. Instead, we both controlled what we could. He ended up reaching his goal first, but he’ll be perfecting and becoming more comfortable as a driver for years. Just like I will be growing and perfecting my writing craft for years.
Why am I even talking about all this?
I don’t want you to give up.
This past week I reviewed the stories from my Start Your Novel Boot Camp for PR Pros and these are books that need to be written. Stories that need to be told. I could hear the doubt in their voices, their worry that their stories weren’t enough or were boring or were confusing or any number of things the writers may have told themselves. I was thrilled to be able to tell them they have something, to encourage them to keep going.
Does that mean the journey will be easy for them moving forward? Hell no. I wish it were. But I hope they will hear my positive words in their ear when it gets hard. That at least one person out here is waiting to read their stories. That may be enough to keep them moving.
And so if you need to hear that this week, too, let me be the one to tell you–keep going. Someone out there needs to read your story. Someone is waiting for your story. Even if that someone is simply you proving to yourself you can write it.
So keep ideating, writing, editing, revising, polishing, querying, submitting, revising again, marketing, and promoting.
Keep running the short races that cover the mileage of your writing journey.
And at some point, take a pause and look back at how far you’ve come.
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