A Word to Amateur Authors

My friends, my pals, my buddies, my fellow writers:

Stop putting yourself down because some professional author with three best sellers writes better than you.

Writing is a difficult skill that takes persistence and time to master. It takes writing bad books, then mediocre books, before you can finally write the good books, and then eventually the amazing books. (And often rewriting the same book fifteen times to get it good.)

It takes, not years of occasionally working on a few little stories here and there, but years of writing and editing and reading, often for hours a day, five days a week.

It takes a lifetime.

All the best authors have drafts – and often whole books – you’ve never gotten to see because they absolutely sucked. They all started out doubting their writing. (Many of them still do, even after three or seven or ten best sellers.)

So stop looking at other authors who’re better than you and feeling discouraged. They’re not better than you. They’re just father along your journey.

If you follow the path they did, you will get to the same destination.

#and to those of you who go ‘but the writers who are better than me aren’t even professional authors, they’re just other amateur writers online!!’ #you don’t know how long and hard they’ve been practicing. #People online, even writers and bloggers, have a tenancy to subconsciously make their own efforts look less and their achievements greater. #I promise you they’ve spent more time on that writing than you would expect, or had more practice before hand, or just plain pulled their best lines from an otherwise awkward mess that still needs editing. #Don’t compare your today’s mess to their week’s highlights.