THE KEY TO PUSHING THROUGH THE HARD TIMES

People often tell me how lucky I am to make a profession from something I enjoy deeply. And I am thrilled that this has been possible for me. I love being a writer. Except when I don’t. No profession is made up of only happy days. Since I line up deadlines, I then I have to meet them. All of them. Some days, that’s hard. Some days the words not only don’t pour out of me, they don’t even dribble. Some days, it just feels too hard. And that’s when the professional side is going well. There are also the surprises, like when a publisher cancels a project you’ve been working on or decides not to publish something they’ve already said yes to. Those days are rough.

For writers who have been published, and especially for those who have been published with some regularity, it can be difficult to talk about the hard days. You don’t want to sound ungrateful. And you don’t want to sound like you’re actually whining about your success, or bragging through complaining. There are lots of ways to be a braggart and none of us want to fall into any of those. So it can be easy to let the hard days isolate you from other writers. But the community of writers is sometimes the only support we have, so we need to work through the hard days as well as dance through the good ones.

You’re not alone. To find ways to get through rejection and other obstacles writers face, listen to the full episode.