There’s only one piece of advice to give a writer:
Put arse in chair; get on with it (variation in chair and choice of toolage may apply).
But when do you give up? How many years does it take before the ‘day job’ becomes the ‘career’? Before you eventually grow bored or distracted? Do you eventually tire of firing your passions and seeing them flare and fade, of throwing yourself at the page and sliding to the floor?
How long can your obsession survive when your alarm cuts through it at seven every morning?
At thirty (thereabouts), I quit. I didn’t mean to. I had two completed novels and umpteen other, smaller projects that I’d waved randomly at the industry from a safe distance… and equally randomly at long-suffering friends, a little closer to home. Yet somehow I’d never quite broken beyond those boundaries and my attention…
…eventually…
…wavered.
It took a long break before my arse went back in that bloody chair.
So – today is a minor victory. It’s taken a little longer than the Writer’s Workshops of my early twenties reckoned, but hey, that’s what quitting did for me.
Find 'Cure', my first ever paid-for piece of short fiction here, on Hub Fiction. (Thank you Alasdair for the invitation and publication).
The moral of this story?
Never Give Up, Never Surrender.
The picture is Rodney Matthews' 'Terrestrial Voyager'. Read the bloody story, already, and you'll get why it's here, okay?
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