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Lessons I’ve learned in Writing No. #1: Forget about Giving Up.
What I know about Stories / July 23, 2015

Picasso’s Don Quixote If there’s a central bit of advice I’ve heard or can give, it’s “Don’t Give Up.”  Don’t give up working, don’t give up trying, and don’t give up on anything if it gnaws at your soul.  If you want to put something new into the world, you have forget giving up. Successful people know, first hand, how hard it is to succeed.  The process involves a lot of failure and mistakes and they developed the fortitude to keep trying until they got it right. Once, I was disheartened to read F. Scott Fitzgerald rewrote some pages twenty times; now I wonder how he made his prose that good after only nineteen revisions.  To make something of quality takes a kind of tenacity comparable to OCD.  If you want to make something good, get used to the work it involves.  Don’t Give Up. It takes another type of resilience to find the people interested in publishing your work.  There are all kinds of venues looking for creative people but few of them will be interested in you.  Your precious creation will be too long, too short, too old-fashioned, too avant-garde and mostly not what they’re looking for.   Your…