Summon up all your badassest writing powers and unleash them with perfect formatting, grammar, and plotting!
Even when you do that, you’re gonna miss some of the targets you’re aiming for.
And that shit’s okay.
Missed your goal of doing traditional publishing in two years? You still wrote the thing, and you came away with your writer’s knives sharpened and ready. For the next goal.
Learned all the self-publishing lingo and put your book out there in the rainforest only to sell ten copies? You learned a frickload of frickin’ facts and now you can use ‘em to build the next thing.
Artists, writers, creators: drag that sadness into the toilet and sacrifice that bastard to the porcelain goddess. ‘Cause guess what? Your worth as a creator isn’t based on the targets you’re not hitting.
There are too many reasons to count why creators miss targets. The publishing industry, people’s reactions to your work, and the general population’s current tastes are all out of your control. Ain’t no way to make millions of people instantly crave your French tentacle drama novel or your big beastly blog on fuzzy creatures. If you miss your target of landing an agent or selling 5,000 e-books, hey, fecal matter occurs. Keep polishing your queries. Continue seeking fellow writers and creators. They’re like your arrows to help you hit that target.
And you’re gonna need a fricktillion arrows to hit it.
Confession time: I started writing 6 years ago (At age 26) and I’ve missed like 90% of the targets I aimed for. Got several manuscripts that only a handful of kind and saintly beta readers have looked at. Chunks of my hard-earned monies fly right into the hands of professors, companies, and bookstores so I can learn to improve the turds I wrote and write better turds.
But dadgummit if I’m gonna let anything internally OR externally stop me shooting for those targets.
Arm yourself with a fricktillion metaphorical arrows and shoot for those targets as long as you got the strength and sometimes even when you don’t. ‘Cause your value as a writer isn’t dictated by how many times you miss. It’s about what you learn, share, and polish along the way.