Gnu Writer Learns the Two ‘P’s’:

Reading about writers reveals an ongoing plaint; you must be prepared to develop Persistence and Patience.  Rarely do you read the back story on a writer that is not laced with tales of long gestation for books or even articles, lots and lots of rejections and, even when ‘discovered’, a seemingly endless cycle of revisions and edits.  The common advice from successful writers is, ‘don’t give up!’

I had a friend in Los Angeles who was an unmarried successful TV producer with no ambition nor pretence of serious writing, but she had an idea, a conceit.  She was discussing with her friend that she was tired of being single and was damned well determined to do something about it.  She would put her facile mind to work on the problem, solve it and document it.  Her friend thought it would make a dandy book and introduced her to a publishing contact in NYC.  The result?  A $100,000. advance for a first time author for a book yet unwritten about a project uncompleted.  The rest of the story?  She found her man (a great guy to whom she is still married), wrote the book and it was a hit.  She appeared on ‘Good Morning America’ and other high-exposure shows.

I mention this only to illustrate that it CAN happen.  Lightning can strike and catapult you out of obscurity…but, that is the rare, rare exception.

For the rest of us, it is and will be a long, hard, lonely slough.