March 19, 2008

Late last night I returned from California’s Mount Hermon Christian Writers Conference. It was everything I had hoped for, and much more. I’ll be sharing bits and pieces in the coming weeks about some things I learned or saw there. One of the keynote speakers was Jerry Jenkins, co-author of the Left Behind series. After one speech, we were each surprised with a copy of his writing book, Writing for the Soul: Instruction and Advice from an Extraordinary Writing Life. I was reading the book on the plane coming home, and the advice below struck a chord with me. (I had just spend five days listening to talks by bestselling, world famous writers. While I know we aren’t supposed to compare ourselves to others, it’s tough not to do. So this excerpt from his book was especially meaningful.)

“Don’t try to write a bestseller or be a modern-day Shakespeare. Simply write your best… If you’re committed to being the best you can be, you’ll achieve your best. If you’re halfhearted, you’ll be only that. I’m not saying that if you commit yourself 100 percent, you’ll sell a million copies, but I can promise you’ll be the best writer you can be. How bad to you want to be the best you can be?…Decide what’s important to you. You will always make the time to do what you really want to do. If your goal is to be the best you can be, you can arrive there every day.” Now that’s success!

His last statement was like a cup of cool water on a dry and thirsty day. Read it again. We can be successful every day if it’s a day we do the best we can with our writing. And if we continue to write every day, the best we can do next month or next year will be much higher than the best we can do today. Like so many things, it’s step by step. We don’t get better in our writing by giant leaps. We get better like the tortoise, not the hare: slow and steady is the pace, slow and steady wins the race.

Do you want to write better? Then commit to writing your best today…and tomorrow…and the next day. You can’t–in the end–be more successful than that. And it will have the added bonus of making your writing days a pleasure.