Dreams with a Deadline

Want to Publish? Persist.

My daughter got a pogo stick when she was 7 1/2. Her best friend had let her try her pogo stick at a playdate the week before. Jeanette had been pogoing since Christmas. She was good. She could pogo 300 times in a row. I saw her do it. My Danielle tried it and got up to three, then four, then two, then three again. Meanwhile, Jeanette was talking about setting a new world record. So Danielle asked her Dad for a pogo stick and he got her one.

She ripped open the box as soon as she got it home and put on her bike helmet (Mom insisted) and her tennis shoes (better for bouncing) and took it out on the back patio. She bounced once, twice, three times, then fell. She tried again, and fell again. This went on for a few minutes. She called her Dad and he came out and held her waist while she bounced. This time she got up to five and he let go, then she fell. She cried. She gave a half-hearted try at bouncing again, but Dad wasn't going to hold her up, and she just wasn't getting it on her own. She tried again and fell against one of the patio poles. Now she cried really hard.

My Mommy Instincts just couldn't stand it any more. I went out to comfort her. "It's too hard. I can't do it," she said over and over again while I checked her back for bruising and broken ribs. Finding none, I urged her to try again. After a couple more failed attempts, she was about ready to give up.

It's All About the Choices We Make

"Well," I said, "You have two choices. You can quit now and say you gave it a good shot, and you have. Or you could keep trying to get it. If you quit, you'll never learn how to pogo. If you keep trying you might get it. You might not, because this is a challenge, but you'll never know if you quit."

We talked about it and she decided she'd set some small goals. First, she'd master five jumps. Then ten. Then twenty. Then, dare she hope, thirty.

Writing is a lot like that, too. Some of us get it right off the bat. We know the exact right market for our work and we get it to just the right editor at just the right time and the magic happens and before we know it, our book is coming out. Others of us have to work a bit harder. We go to conferences, network, participate in writing boards, read lots of books, take lots of classes, and write, write, write, but still no contract.

Others of us work really hard and enjoy some small successes, but that big hit eludes us. Some of us make a pretty good living at one form of writing or another, say business or technical writing, but we long to publish a novel or a special non-fiction project or biography. It would be easy to quit and a lot of people do. But others of us, we keep plugging away, hoping that one day it happens. The mists lift, the puzzle pieces come together, and we learn the secret handshake.

What's the secret? Persistence.

Author Patricia Wrede wrote, "Talent is way down on the list of things you need to write; it comes in a distant fourth, after persistence, motivation, and discipline. And the reason is that 'talent' is as common as mud; what's rare is the motivation to sit down and actually do something with it, the discipline to do it regularly, and the persistence to stick with it until it's finished. I know oodles of extremely talented people who will never publish anything, because they won't ever sit down and actually *write* anything, much less finish it."

Dream it. Do it. Goals are just dreams with a deadline.

I have another writer friend who quotes Rita Mae Brown at the bottom of her email signature: "Don't hope more than you're willing to work." When Candie’s first novel came out, she called herself a 25-year overnight success. She took a long, round-about trip to publication, writing everything from résumés to business profiles to articles about construction for a Tennessee magazine, but she made it.

Don't give up. You can do this. Set some realistic and achievable goals for yourself. Set up milestones to measure your progress. Remember, goals are just dreams with a deadline. I forget where I read that, but it stuck.

Here's another favorite quote:

"Imagination is stronger than knowledge. Myth is more potent than history. Dreams are more powerful than fact. Hope always triumphs over experience. Love is stronger than death. It's been said that each of us can influence up to 250 people in our lifetimes. How will you be influential? Be bold, and mighty unseen forces will come to your aid." - Robert Fulgham

Be bold.

Oh, and my daughter? By Sunday morning she'd reached 100 consecutive jumps. By Monday, at a playdate with her friends from school, she was using the pogo stick as transportation, using it to get from the parking lot to the playground, and all around the play area, and was giving pogo lessons to the boys. Tuesday she hit six sets of one hundred jumps with short breaks in between. Then three hundred consecutive jumps. She can do this. She's proven to herself that she can succeed as long as she sticks to her goals. Maybe she’ll even set a world record.

You can do this, too. Dream it. Do it. Write it now.