Quote of the Week

A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.   ~ Richard Bach

Sometimes it seems like the road to writing success gets longer as we walk. That it gets harder as we learn more. It seems hopeless. Who am I kidding? I’ll never get any better seems like a perfect summation, a good epitaph to a writing career that died before birth.

But as the quote above reminds each of us, every writer started out as bad as I am. I’m sure the young J.K. Rowling struggled with plotting. At some point, Stephen King probably abused adverbs. But they kept going and got better. A lot better. Others just as good as they were quit, and now we’ll never know how good they might have become.

Don’t quit because it’s hard, or because you don’t start off writing like Neil Gaiman. Just write. You’ll need to go through the ugly duckling phase to pass through to the other side. Even if you never become a best seller, you’ll get better, and better. You’ll be telling the tales only you could tell. And just maybe you’ll write a story that will influence someone else in some profound way. You might even inspire someone else to pick up the pen and become a writer.