I’m late! It’s after 7:00am on Monday, and no blog was posted. I’m sure everyone was waiting with bated breath. But, I got so caught up in watching the Olympics this week, that I totally forgot. Oops! Oh, well. I am only human, after all.
Thinking about the Olympics makes me think about the athletes and the years of training that they go through in order to even make it into the games. Most participants spend their whole lives perfecting their sport, and often their main goal is the Olympics, and they only have a few chances in their lifetime to make it since the games just happen every four years.
The people that I really feel for are those that train all their lives, finally make it to the Olympics, and then get booted out after the very first preliminary heat. Can you imagine? All that training and years of sacrifice, only to go out on the first event? If we look at it that way, it might be devastating.
But why not look at it from the opposite perspective? All those years of rigorous work and effort, and they made it to the Olympics! Yeah, maybe they didn’t make it to the finals or win a gold medal. But for the rest of their lives, they can proudly tell everyone that they are an Olympian! Think of how many athletes sacrifice the same amount of time and effort and never make it to the games.
This is the way I think we should look at writing, especially when it comes to completing a book and publishing it ourselves. If you’re like me, you’ve been writing for years. I don’t want to say that I was training as hard as the Olympians by any stretch of the imagination. But whether I realized it or not, I was training—training myself to write better.
Even during the years where I was working and barely had time to write fiction, I was writing technical documents, proof-of-concepts, proposals, emails to my bosses, co-workers, and customers. I was actually writing a lot. Sure, writing dialogue is a lot different from writing an email to a customer about a product they’re interested in, but I still had to think about what I was going to say and how I was going to present the information in my letter. It still required stringing words together that got my point across.
So, when I did finally take the time to focus on my goal of writing and publishing a novel, I was actually more prepared than I thought, But I still needed to practice. I still needed to train. And I still needed to learn. And like some of the would-be Olympians, my first attempt failed. I tried to write a book in a NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month) event and stopped at 25,000 words. I booted myself out in the first event.
But like many of the Olympian hopefuls, I didn’t give up. I learned from my mistakes. More tips on writing a fiction book found their way into my library and onto my reading list. I wrote more, brainstormed ideas, and outlined book ideas for future attempts. And I tried again, and again.
On my fifth attempt at NANOWRIMO, I succeeded. Oh, I had written some rough drafts in the second, third, and fourth years, but wasn’t happy enough with them to continue working on them after the contest was over. Not until COVID hit us all, and I had a lot more free time, did I finally break down and continue working on my novel after the November writing event passed.
Honestly, I think even if COVID hadn’t come along, I would have finished The RH Factor. It was the first one of my rough drafts that I really thought had the meat to become a completed, fine-tuned, proof-read novel. I liked the story, and I liked the characters. And it was a murder mystery, which is one of my favorite genres to read.
The fact that the first book I finished was the same genre of books I love reading should have been no surprise. Have you ever heard the term Write what you love? I should have listened to that advice. Now I know, it’s what I should have been focusing on the whole time.
I also love medical mystery thrillers, and that’s what my second book, MYND Control, turned out to be. Hopefully, I’ve learned my lesson—stick to what you love to read. I guess if it turned out that I was horrible at writing these genres, that advice wouldn’t hold true. But for me, at least, it does.
What’s the point of all this banter? I think it’s simply that if you have a goal, go for it. If it takes years to get there, if you fail multiple times before you reach it, who cares? The point is to reach it—not to worry about how much work or time it takes to make it.
So, write like an Olympian. Learn. Train. Practice. And don’t give up until you reach your goal. If you want to be an author—write, read about writing, join a writing group, take a writing class, practice your craft. Eventually, you will be ready to cross the finish line!
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