Hard Work Will Beat Talent
Put the work into your craft, use different tools, learn to accept the journey and learn to be great at what you love.
In the last 6 months, I have dedicated a large portion of time trying to be a better writer, day to day. I’ve read countless books on the craft.
I’ve read On Writing by Stephen King, The Writers Journey by Christopher Vogler, You Are A Writer by Jeff Goins, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamont and The Emotional Craft of Fiction by Donald Mass just to name a few.
All of these books are great tools, which help with the journey for any writer, giving tools to be a better and more accomplished writer and I enjoyed all of them.
I found a common theme amongst all writing books. You need to have talent, work your ass off and hope like hell at a certain point you get a few lucky breaks along the way. Every writer has a journey. My journey of how I began writing wasn’t magical, it wasn’t even a single moment.
I grew up knowing I wanted to write, I don’t remember the single moment I discovered I wanted to write, it was more a series of moments. Not once did I voice wanting to be a writer, I knew I wanted to be one internally.
Part of me didn’t want to be a writer, I knew how hard, how emotionally devastating and how painful of a journey it would be. In all honesty, I have no idea how I knew this, I was naïve but logical. Writing is hard anyone who has written in any form knows this.
I wrote in secret for years, inconsistently and not well; I don’t really want to call it writing but it planted a seed. Reading and writing in school wasn’t cool, it wasn’t sexy to be seen reading a book and therefore became one of my secrets.
In school I performed so poorly in English I was taken to a tutor, to help with spelling and sentence structure. I was consistently told I was a terrible writer and was a D grade student, who occasionally got slightly better marks. My poor work ethic was the blame by teachers. Later in high school, I was writing in secret.
The theme comes back, you need to have talent to be a writer. I always and still believe work ethic can outwork talent. The problem when I read these books is, I have no idea if I have talent.
I publish pieces and no one tells me they suck, but maybe people are just being nice or don’t care or don’t appreciate the written word.
I don’t know a single writer.
I don’t know any published authors on a personal level. I wasn’t inspired by a writer I knew. Writing wasn’t a career option growing up within the middle class of Australia; if you told someone you were going to be a writer, they would consider you a lonely person who sat in a dark room self-indulging in their own thoughts. Not a noble career choice by any means.
I instead modelled myself on writers I was reading, they were my model, their books were my lifeline. Other than these models I have been working it out myself, which is both a risk and how I feel it should be. Feel free to enlighten me otherwise.
I am scared and probably taking the longer path, but I feel this is what makes writing fulfilling. I am putting all of myself onto a page, I am learning slowly but surely, I am getting better day by day.
To those people who are constantly trying to determine if they have talent like I am myself. It doesn’t matter, do you enjoy doing it? Then keep writing.
There will be days you doubt every choice, there will be days you wake up don’t have it and quit, there will be moments you don’t ever think you can achieve all of what other amazing people achieved before you. But guess what someone you considered great was once in that position and they probably feel that way even after all their success.
Fall in love with whatever your craft is, the process and being a student. Worry about the other stuff later, it’ll work itself out.
Because I refuse to live in a world where I can’t get great at whatever I love doing and you shouldn’t either.
