Persistence counts. In the film A Million Miles Away, Jose Hernandez’s teacher tells the migrant workers’ kid who dreams of being an astronaut that “persistence is your superpower.” (If you haven’t seen this film, based on Hernandez’s real-life story, do. It’s a crash course in what it takes to achieve your dreams, however out of this world.)
Persistence is every writer’s superpower, too. As many of us tackle NaNoWriMo this month, here are some other words of wisdom to keep us on track.
“First forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not. Habit will help you finish and polish your stories. Inspiration won’t. Habit is persistence in practice.”
~ Octavia Butler
“You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.”
~ Isaac Asimov
“When I face the desolate impossibility of writing five hundred pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.”
~ John Steinbeck
“We are made to persist. That’s how we find out who we are.”
~ Tobias Wolff
“I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.”
~ Beth Revis
“Listen, Stephen King used to write in the washroom of his trailer after his kids went to sleep. Harlan Ellison wrote in the stall of a bathroom of his barracks during boot camp. Elmore Leonard got up at 5 AM every morning to write before work. Every time my alarm goes off at 5 AM and I don’t want to get up, or I would rather sit down after work and play a videogame, I think about those guys. Take care of your family. They need you and love you. Make time for them. Then stop screwing around and finish your damn book.”
~ Bernard Schaffer
“The rewrites are a struggle right now. Sometimes I wish writing a book could just be easy for me at last. But when I think about it practically, I am glad it’s a struggle. I am (as usual) attempting to write a book that’s too hard for me. I’m telling a story I’m not smart enough to tell. The risk of failure is huge. But I prefer it this way. I’m forced to learn, forced to smarten myself up, forced to wrestle. And if it works, then I’ll have written something that is better than I am.”
~ Shannon Hale
“I am not at all in a humour for writing; I must write on until I am.”
~ Jane Austen
“Get it down. Take chances. It may be bad, but it’s the only way you can do anything really good.
~ William Faulkner
“If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word.”
~ Margaret Atwood
“The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”
~ Mary Heaton Vorse
“Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens.”
~ Ray Bradbury
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.”
~ Louis L’Amour
“Writing a novel is like building a wall brick by brick; only amateurs believe in inspiration.”
~ Frank Yerby
“Doing it all the time, whether or not we are in the mood, gives us ownership of our writing ability. It takes it out of the realm of conjuring where we stand on the rock of isolation, begging the winds for inspiration, and it makes it something as do-able as picking up a hammer and pounding a nail. Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft. It is a simple and workable thing that can be as steady and reliable as a chore.”
~ Julia Cameron
“One thing that helps is to give myself permission to write badly. I tell myself that I’m going to do my five or 10 pages no matter what, and that I can always tear them up the following morning if I want. I’ll have lost nothing—writing and tearing up five pages would leave me no further behind than if I took the day off.”
~ Lawrence Block
“Exercise the writing muscle every day, even if it is only a letter, notes, a title list, a character sketch, a journal entry. Writers are like dancers, like athletes. Without that exercise, the muscles seize up.”
~ Jane Yolen
“I get a lot of letters from people. They say, ‘I want to be a writer. What should I do?’ I tell them to stop writing to me and get on with it.”
~ Ruth Rendell
So get on with it already….
This post originally appeared at Career Authors.