The Writing Dream: and How to Make it to Happily Ever After

If the answer is you want to be a writer, then you’ve got to write first.

Make a commitment right now to write thirty minutes first thing every day for the next thirty days. Thirty minutes for thirty days. It’s not that much, is it?

For the first time in my life, I didn’t have someone to report to—except my wife. The first week was easy. It was every day after that was hard. Staying on task, not getting distracted by family, or just sitting around “thinking” or watching Netflix. Instead, I needed to do my job, my new job—sitting in the chair, hands on keyboard, working. While

But you know what? If you put in enough days like that, eventually the book gets written. Eventually the book gets published. And then one day you get sales.

Nothing teaches you like continued practice, and nothing sells your first book like publishing your second. Then your third. Looking back on my career, what carried me through to this point was writing on a lot of days when I really didn’t want to.

If your writing’s crap, and your editor threatens to cut you, so you bribe her with chocolate and Starbucks gift cards and point out that while this draft’s horrendous, it’s still better than the first first draft you ever wrote, so… you write your next book.

Even if your job is so demanding you can only get in five hundred words a day. In four months, that’s a 60,000-word novel.

But then it occurred to me I could flip my thinking around. My day job wasn’t a burden, and neither was my word count goal. Instead of looking at my job as a distraction from writing, it was the support I needed to finance my writing.

halfway through the year, I gave up on that goal and found it extremely liberating. Here’s why. With my mind focused on going full-time, the pressure of pumping out thousands and thousands of words a day to get the books I wanted out by the end of the year, I lost perspective on everything else happening in my life. My brain was constantly remindin