Can you handle the long haul?

Quick success is very very rare.  In any field of endeavor.

It DOES happen.  So beginners study those cases obsessively.  Hoping that they will find the secret ingredient, the magic method, the coming trend.

Careful studies of those cases have come to the conclusion that often the sudden success comes along at exactly the moment there was a fertile environment for it.  An environment which was not there the year before.  Nor will be there the year after.

Those successes are “perfect storms” which happen when a dozen or more rare and innocuous conditions happen.  They combine to create something much greater than the sum of their parts, an audience hungry for exactly the artwork available at exactly the right moment.

Usually if we look closely at the lives of successful authors we see a familiar pattern.  Familiar because we have gone through it and are going through it ourselves.

S/he was telling stories in kindergarten and illustrating them with crayon stick figures.  In middle school s/he and her friends got together and speculated endlessly: What if Pippi Long-Stocking had this adventure?  Suppose there was a sixth Power Ranger with these powers?  Suppose Spock did this?

What if Darcy had favored Jane and Bingley had favored Elizabeth?  What if Dr. Watson was actually the great detective and let Sherlock Holmes take all the credit?

In high school and college s/he wrote endless fanfic.  S/he took writing classes and wrote terrible stories with flashes of competence and even brilliance.  S/he self-published several mediocre books ignored by almost every one.

I just discovered a new singer I’ve become crazy about.  When I read her biography on Amazon I discovered that same familiar pattern.  She’d been learning and playing the piano since childhood, making up and singing her own songs.  She played every venue she could from childhood through teen and young adult years: birthday parties, junior and senior high school, bar and bat mitzvahs, dingy night clubs.  She self-published her first and second album, the first when she was a teenager.

Can you do the same as those other successes?  Can you write and write and write for years, failing and failing again, slowly getting better?  Can you begin to finish stuff, begin to put it before the public in whatever way you can?  Can you endure the small sales most beginning writers earn and keep on trying?

Can you handle the long haul?