Writing is a very lonely job. You have no teammates, you’re not part of a group and you don’t have a partner. It can be really hard to keep going when it’s just you and your muse, who may or may not be cooperative depending on its mood. When Stephen King wrote the first few pages of “Carrie,” he threw it away because he thought it was crap but his wife fished it out of the trash and encouraged him to keep going. He expanded it into a novel and when it was released in paperback, it sold over one million copies in its first year. Think of what could have happened instead if his wife hadn’t been there.
That simple act shows how important it is to have someone believe in you and support you through all your tortured deranged artist moments, both successful and unsuccessful ones. There is power in someone believing in you. Agents will go to an exorcism before they go out on a limb for you and publishers will gladly level the rainforest issuing rejection letters to keep you out of print. It can all get very discouraging and that one person that holds your hand and tells you to keep going is the one that will get you through those days. That No 2 person in your writing life, your muse being No 1, is almost always a spouse or a parent, sometimes a mentor.
My father believed very much in my writing and his invaluable support pushed me on all of my teens when I was unsure what exactly I was doing. If you’ve got someone like this in your life, you are one lucky person and if you don’t, you have no other choice but to rely on your willpower otherwise you’ll wake up one day and give up.
My father believed very much in my writing and his invaluable support pushed me on all of my teens when I was unsure what exactly I was doing. If you’ve got someone like this in your life, you are one lucky person and if you don’t, you have no other choice but to rely on your willpower otherwise you’ll wake up one day and give up.
