Welcome to another blog chain! Today’s question comes from Amanda. She asks,

“What do you do to keep yourself motivated when you feel like you’re not making any progress in your writing career?”

This may sound corny, but it all comes down to my parents. Growing up, not succeeding wasn’t an option. Sure, at times there was a lot of pressure (e.g. “90? What happened to the other 10 points?”), but the main thing they were trying to instill was that if you worked hard enough, you could accomplish anything. From their perspective, if they were able to bring us to America with literally nothing and take any job they could to obtain a better life for my sister and me, then we better make good on all opportunities we were given. So I grew up thinking that as long as I worked my butt off, the sky was the limit.

Sometimes it was crushing–like when no amount of studying would change the fact that my brain just didn’t get physics. Usually, though, it served me well. In h.s., I entered writing contests even when I was told there was stiff competition–and won. I applied for afterschool jobs where supposedly you had to know people for it to matter (I knew no one; I got the job). In college, I didn’t care what the “in” sororities were. I rushed the ones I liked, the ones people said only took few (I got bids from them all). And after college, when I was applying for teaching jobs, I applied to all districts that interested me. I didn’t care that they supposedly only took friends of the superintendent. I knew from past experience those things weren’t always true.

This is the attitude I took with me when I quit full-time teaching after 8 years in the profession and decided to pursue freelance writing. There was that same attitude of no one being able to break in, that you had to know people, etc. I didn’t buy that. I took classes and pitched and pitched and pitched until stories started getting picked up. It was just about the odds. When I wrote my YA and then sold my YA, everyone asked who I knew, how I got published. I told them about my great agent. Many assumed I knew someone to get her. Nope.

What’s been instilled in me is that you work until something happens. And I really believe if you keep at it, it will happen. This could be naive or corny, but that’s how I feel. I also learned something else. It’s easy to think that it won’t be you who gets hired for that dream job or that no way will you be the editor of the lit magazine or that contest will be won by anyone else but you so why bother? But that’s all fear. If you don’t enter, if you don’t apply, you can’t say you were rejected.

I had felt like that before. For a while, it stopped me from submitting any of my essays or stories to magazines. Writing was THE dream for me. Always. And submitting something and then being rejected made me think that that would be the end of the writing dream. So I did nothing. But if you never try, that’s worse. Especially if trying can make the DREAM a reality.

So motivation? I know what I want. I want a writing career that lasts. I want to write books forever. The only way that’s going to happen is if I stop doubting myself (and that happens plenty), stop comparing myself to others (again, plenty), and just get moving. Finish those sets of ideas, that novel that’s been “almost finished” for weeks. Not succeeding is not an option.

Check out Christine’s Gleektastic post from yesterday, and tune in tomorrow for Sarah’s post.

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