When you decide to make the real decision to be a writer, you have to decide what are your goals in this life?  To be published?  To be rich and famous?  To get better with every story and eventually write the great American novel?  Well, those are all perfectly respectable goals, but, as with any goal in any area, there’s one very important trait you’re going to need in order to meet it: persistence.

When I started writing—this was early 1991, I think, in the second semester of my last year of high school (better late than never)—I had only one goal: get published.  I knew whatever else the writing life might hold, it was all going to start there.  Fame never appealed to me, but I wouldn’t mind enough money that I didn’t have to work a day job.  In the beginning, though, I just wanted to be published.  I wanted to open a magazine or a book and see a title to something I wrote with my name in black print at the top.

But that wasn’t going to happen unless I did the work.  So I wrote.  I wrote sometimes in the morning before school.  At the time, I was taking a computer programming class at a vo-tech school the first half of every day, so when I got done with my work there, I’d use the computer, word processing program and printer, and write.  I’d write when I got home from school in the short time I had before my fast-food shift started.  And if I got home early enough at night, I’d write before bed.

After graduation, my best friend and I would leave our fast-food jobs at night and spend a few hours almost every night at the local Perkins, reading and writing longhand.

When I switched jobs and started working days, I’d write for an hour or two when I got home.  Around this time I started submitting my work.  I didn’t expect it to get accepted, but I wouldn’t have complained if it did.  But rejected or not, I knew I wasn’t going to be published—and this was still my goal a year in—if I didn’t start submitting.  This was in the early 1990s before self-publishing was as prevalent as it is today.  Back then, submitting to small press magazines was pretty much the only way to break in.

Eventually the hours on that new job got crazy and I started having to get up at 3:30 in the morning to write for an hour before work.   Eventually I settled into a pattern there; summer hours were 5-1 and I’d write for two hours after work, winter hours were 7-3 and I’d write for two hours before work.

It took four years of writing every day, of submitting everything I wrote—and resubmitting it when the eventual rejection letter came—before I saw my first acceptance letter.  Finally, all of that work had paid off.  Someone out there in the wide world, someone I had never met, read something I made up in my head and decided it was good enough to share with the world.  And really, that’s all I was asking.

And then it didn’t happen.  The publisher of that magazine had to close down before my story saw publication, and I was right back where I started.

I suppose I could have sunk into a depression, given up, stopped writing, stopped taking time away every single day from my son who was only two by then, and just gotten on with my life.

But it wasn’t just about being published; ask any writer and they’ll tell you the same thing: this is when we feel the most like our true selves.  When words are pouring out of us and stories are forming that didn’t exist before, that’s when all’s … well, not RIGHT with the world, but more right than it was before because we’re doing the thing we honestly, truly believe we were put on earth to do.

But by this point, like I said, I had a two-year-old son and I really loved spending time with him.  So if I look back on all those hours I didn’t spend with him, I had to think that counted for something.  And what did it count for?  Being published.  I spent that time writing, because I wanted to be published, and when I thought about it, that goal hadn’t gone away just because one magazine closed.

I still wanted to be published.  So I had to keep going.  Every single day, weekends and holidays, I never took a day off, two hours a day when time and job allowed, writing, editing, revising, submitting, WAITING—the worst part of submitting is the waiting, and thank God for the advent of the internet and email and email submissions (I once submitted a story and got an acceptance in my email thirty minutes later … to an anthology that never materialized, but by then I was getting used to it).

It wasn’t until 1999, EIGHT YEARS after I wrote my first “professional” story, before I saw my name in print.  It was the summer 1999 issue of Sepulchre Magazine (vol.2, issue 4) where my short story “Preparations” appeared.  More appearances followed, “Inside” in an issue of Prose Ax was next, followed by a few ezine appearances.  There are no words to describe that feeling, which is unfortunate since I’ve been writing for over 30 years and should be able to describe anything I can imagine, but the elation and the satisfaction that comes with seeing that in real life, holding it in your hand, it’s a joy unlike any other.  And it never would have happened if I hadn’t persisted.

Now, the story that did it, “Preparations”, I wrote in one sitting after work one night, a few hundred words that pretty much just spilled out of me, got a very minimal edit and revision, but it NEVER would have happened if I hadn’t been putting in the work, daily, all those years.  Could I have taken a holiday or a weekend off here and there?  Sure, probably.  But writing is a skill like any other, and like any other you get better with practice.  And I’ve never been all that great at too many things.  In high school I was ok at art, but never intuitive with it.  Same with learning the guitar.  I can memorize some chords and eventually fumble my way through a song, but I’ll never improvise and create something beautiful.  But I’m not too bad a writer.  Of all the things I kind of know how to do, that’s the one I’m the most confident in, and so I still wake up every morning—3:00 now; my work hours are different than they were—and write before work.  Why, when self-publishing is right there, when I haven’t submitted to a magazine in over a decade, do I still do it every single day?  Why, when my goal was to be published, and I met that goal over 25 years ago?

Because I’m a writer.  And writers WRITE.  It’s really the only way you can call yourself a writer: by writing.  And because I never forgot that goal.  To be published.

I have a new goal now: to get out all these stories in my head before I die.  And at 51, that day is way closer than it was when I was 20.  I don’t have time to waste.  But the only way to get it done is to write, every day.  This blog post is part of that goal, as is what I plan to do with it at some point.  I would have much rather spent this morning reading comics or watching YouTube videos or better yet, in bed, curled up with my wife and getting more of the sleep I know I so badly need, but I have a plan and a goal, and the only way those get done is with persistence.

There’s a quote from George Bernard Shaw I’ve always liked:

“Go on with writing plays, my boy.  One of these days one of these London producers will go into his office and say to his secretary, ‘Is there a play from Shaw this morning?’ and when she says, ‘No,’ he will say, ‘Well then, we have to start on the rubbish,’ and that’s your chance, my boy.”

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