A Quote by Octavia Butler
People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.
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I just never, ever want to give up. Most battles are won in the 11th hour, and most people give up. If you give up once, it's quite hard. If you give up a second time, it's a little bit easier. Give up a third time, it's starting to become a habit.
I don't impose political responsibilities on my fiction. The last thing I would ever want to do, for example, is write a novel that would appear to want to tell people what to think about the immigration debate, and I would never write a novel whose sole ambition was to give a "positive" view of immigrants. I'm for open borders, by the way - down with the nation state!
I think the most important thing is just to write. It sounds so simple, but sometimes it's not. You can get so distracted - -by having to work other jobs, or what other people have to say about your writing - -but the one thing that really matters is that you just keep going, especially when you're working on a novel. It's so easy to get discouraged and give up.
Most people with a big idea, great talent and/or something to say don't get lucky at first. Or second. Or even third. It's so easy to conclude that if you're not lucky, you're not good. So persistence becomes an essential element of good, because without persistence, you never get a chance to get lucky.
If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.
Persistence is probably the single most common quality of high achievers. They simply refuse to give up. They longer you hang in there, the greater the chance that something will happen in your favor. No matter how hard it seems, the longer you persist the more likely your success.
No one has something original or important to say will willing we run the risk of being misunderstood; people who write obscurely are either unskilled in writing or up to mischief
When people write a novel, they want to have that reach and that impact. To get it with a first novel, you can either see it as an albatross or a calling card.
Being a writer, writing for a living, is one long persistence game. Everyone wants you to quit. Quite often, you want to quit. You get kicked down. You come up swinging. You keep going. Either you are committed to it, or you aren't.
Entertainers are nothing special. Maybe we have a talent for singing a song, but other people have talents. I wish fans would just come up and say 'hello' before asking for an autograph. I wish they would just say, 'Hello, I'm so and so, and I just want to shake your hand.' I'm impressed when I find people like that. Most people just say, 'Sign here,' and treat you like a statue.
I realized early on that success was tied to not giving up. Most people in this business gave up and went on to other things. If you simply didn't give up, you would outlast the people who came in on the bus with you.
No one ever achieved a goal by being interested in its achievement. One must be committed. In fact, in studying the source of people's success, I've found that persistence overshadows even talent as the most valued and effective resource in creating and shaping the quality of life. Most people give up a maddening five feet from their goal!
Aim to write for an hour per day. I used to be a teacher, and an hour a day before school was all it took for me to write my first book. Don't get discouraged if a holiday or illness interrupts your writing habit. Just start it up again.
The single most important route of success is persistence - never, ever give up!
People either fall into two camps, where they're pro-fanfic, or they're anti-fanfic. I would not have had the skills to write and publish my first novel if I hadn't been writing fanfic.
I naively thought I would quit television writing, move up to Seattle, my novel would come out, and then I'd have a novel writing career, and so I found myself really stuck in this very poisonous self-pitying state and felt like I'd never write again. And I blamed Seattle for that.
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