Writing is hard.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I love
writing and there are few things in life that I enjoy more than telling a good story.
By the same token, however, it is also a monumental task to write an entire
novel. How then do you accomplish something like this? The answer is, like with
everything else, one step at a time.
My writing began in earnest back
in 2017 when I started a writing program called O.Y.A.N. (One Year Adventure Novel).
The first half of the program is planning and outlining and the second half
writing the actual book. When I first saw the program, I thought, “there’s no
way I can write an entire book in half year!” I was wrong.
In fact, once I got into the
pattern of writing for half an hour to an hour every day, I realized that the
trick to writing isn’t mad bursts of inspiration that last days followed by
periods of no work. The trick is to simply do a little every day, build good
writing habits, and never stop working. Although you may look at every
individual day of work and think you didn’t accomplish much, those individual
days stack up sooner than you think.
This became especially apparent
to me when, in November of 2018, I accepted the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) challenge, a free online challenge that asks you to write 50,000
words in one month. Insane, right? I didn’t think I could do it at the time,
but just by plugging ahead every day, working for an hour or so, I was able to
write every needed word before the deadline of November 31. Barely. My writing
career has greatly expanded since then; I’ve written and am currently editing a
trilogy, I’ve joined the Young Writer’s Workshop, an online program of young
writers like myself, and I’ve already started planning several series for the
future. Through all of this, however, I haven’t forgotten my one primary task;
to just keep writing and enjoy my writing, a little bit every day.
If someone were to ask me what
they need in order to be a writer, I would reply that they need passion and
dedication for what they want to write. If you don’t feel passionate and
creative about what you want to write, then you won’t have any reason to write.
Every great writer I can think of cared about what they wrote and loved it so
much that they were willing to write about that thing as a full-time job. On
the other hand, if you don’t have the dedication to push forward and keep
writing, even when you don’t feel like it, then your writing will never
improve. Believe me, I have hard days too, but if I only wrote when I felt like
it, then I would never finish crafting all of my ideas into novels. In the end,
my advice to anyone out there looking to start writing seriously would be
summed up in one simple sentence; find something you care about, and never,
ever quit. Happy writing!
