No Pain, No Gain

Would you pay someone to beat the crap out of you?

Though it’s a bit drastic, that might just be the right way of thinking to reach success.

Everyone has the potential to be great.  Whether it is to be a great accountant or a great writer, everyone has something that he or she has the potential to do greatly.  The problem is finding that specific “sweet-spot” where all your being intersects.

You can’t be great at something that you hate.  You can be good at it, but not great.  If you don’t have a passion for your job, you’re not going to strive to become better at it and you will continue to do it in the easiest manner possible.

You get better by living on the edge of your abilities.  A landowner can’t expand his borders by remaining safely inside of them.  He has to go to the edges and explore the parts he does not know about.  Though it might be frightening and dangerous, it is the only way he can get more land.

Just the same, if you sit in the middle, the easy way, and never challenge your abilities, you can’t grow.

Especially in this age, living a comfortable life is pretty common.  Having enough money to study a respectable course at university, getting a steady job via a family contact and then simmering until you die someday.  You were comfortable and ended a fairly happy person.  But did you achieve something?  Were you great at something?  Did you leave the world better than you found it?

Life is supposed to be hard.  Just ask John from Brave New World.  If everything is going easy, you’re stagnating.  You’re not growing.  Make a choice to increase the difficulty in your life instead of decreasing it.  You can piddle away at some stories and a WIP novel for years and decide that you will eventually get it right, or you can increase your writing time and work harder on your novel, pounding away at the keys night after night until you get the characters just right and the plot flowing smoothly.

Creep over your borders and see what lies there.  What you find there might surprise you.

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The Meaning of Success

Humans, by nature, like to compare things to other things, be it human to human or subatomic particle to subatomic particle. For this reason, humans also like to compare themselves to people in similar situations as their own. Ergo, a horror writer will almost certainly at some point compare his or her work to Lovecraft or King.

How do you measure your success as a writer? Do you take a passage from you WIP and a passage from a Stephen King novel, print them out, shuffle them around and ask a beta reader to tell you which one is the best?

Unfortunately, the chances are pretty good that your work will not be as good as the super best-selling author you are comparing yourself against. Thus many authors might think to themselves, “I’m not even close to writing like this!” and perhaps even give up.

Since we, as humans, compare things almost subconsciously, I can’t really tell you to not compare yourself to others who have made success, but I can tell you to look at it differently. Stephen King quality should be a goal, not a measurement. Aim to reach it, don’t compare your current work to his. Improving your writing is a life-long journey, ask any of the best-selling authors. They continue to learn the craft, and so should you.

To see how far you’ve come, you should glance to your goal, but also glance back to see what you have overcome*. When you do this, you can see what areas you’ve improved on and which areas you still struggle with.

When you look upon the goal too hard, your mind will want to even things out and you will start to copy the goal instead of reaching it. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t learn from the masters of writing, but each author has a voice that needn’t be substituted with a copied one from a grandmaster.

Find your voice and look at how far you’ve come. See your goal ahead, but realise that there is room for movement. This will allow you to grow as a writer and then get the hell onto that NY Times Bestseller list.**

* Read some of the stories that you wrote five years ago and you’ll find yourself wondering, “Did I write this?”

** That’s every book writer’s dream, right? If not, substitute the correct dream in there.

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