Committment

What’s your level of commitment to your chosen passion?

I write every day, or edit existing material to get it ready for publication. It’s a requirement for me, something I make myself complete before I give consideration to other things I’d like to do.

As I type this, my family has spent a fun day enjoying the many sights and attractions in Orlando, Florida. I’m quite tired, and given our early start time tomorrow, by any reasonable person’s standards I should be sleeping right now. As a matter of fact, I’m the only one still awake in our hotel room.

But I’ve committed myself to seeing my novels written, and so today I’ve edited two chapters from my first book, streamlined a synopsis for a prequel to the series, and typed up about a thousand words worth of notes for Book Two in the series. I wrote the prequel synopsis earlier on this trip, and have finished edits to several chapters, including a section that I struggled with during my rapid drafting of Book One.

I consider this to be a light workload on something I’m so passionate about, and on a “normal” day I’d set higher standards for excellence to represent my level of commitment. I like to set solid daily goals and then try to blast through them. I’ve learned many authors target 1,000 words per day, figuring that they’ll write about 350,000 words each year, the equivalent of 3-5 novels. I targeted 1,5000 words per day during my draft writing process, and average almost three times that amount. Why? Because I don’t want to wonder what it would be like to have a page full of written material on sites like Amazon, and I’d like to find out in the shortest time possible.

I’m also one who believes that small successes breed good habits. As I’m editing Book One, I’m finding errors. I capitalized special terms in one chapter but not another, found that I’d failed to type out an entire word (“…his attach to his loved one was remark…”) on multiple occasions, and have some words that simply made no sense. That’s fine. The excitement of writing a novel that quickly is one that inspires me, and it’s one of the reasons that I’m already working on two other books (Book Two and a prequel) before I’ve published – or even finalized edits on – the first book.

Push yourself to work hard for your dreams. Naysayers will probably look at your successes, especially if it’s in a field they themselves want to try, and make excuses about why you’re succeeding and they’re not. I’ve always enjoyed the ones who say they’d do that too, but they just don’t have the time. The implication, of course, is that the one succeeding has no commitments or responsibilities consuming hours, and as such has nothing but idle time that they are now finally using with some level of productivity.

This is nonsense. Everyone has the same number of hours in a day, or a week, or a month. I did not have time; I created it. I stopped watching network TV a while ago, and during my draft process I gave up watching sports, my sole TV addiction. In other words, I didn’t have time to write, but I did create the time to write. Stay up an hour after others go to bed to work on your novel or whatever your passion may be. Get up an hour earlier. Whatever you need to do, make the time to pursue your passion. Commit yourself to it. And reap the joy that the pursuit of a worthy goal brings to all who make the effort to chase their dreams.