Every writer wants to move faster. We want to hurry to finish our current draft, to sign a deal with an agent or publisher, to see our book on the shelf, to build a colossal number of social media followers, to make it on a bestseller list, to win an award, our list of hurried desires is endless.
The problem and what we often forget is that writing is not a sprint. It’s a cross-country marathon over terrain that sometimes seems impassable by slow effort, much less speed. Our map on this journey is patience.
Patience, giving the opportunity, and allowing it to work within our flow are the secret ingredients for mastery, endurance, popularity, and even legacy. The most successful writers I know are not the most talented (don’t tell them I said that), but the steadiest.
Patience is not the same as waiting for something to happen. Patience is active persistence, recognizing that things don’t always come as quickly or as orderly as we would like.
At first, impatience masquerades as ambition. You want it now: the agent, the publisher, the advance. Those are great desires, and that sense of urgency can undoubtedly get you impatiently started, but your impatience won’t sustain you.
Real careers are built over years of consistent, but unseen, work. There is movement, but no one usually sees it. Suddenly, to your friends, you are an overnight success. We both know it doesn’t work that way.
Patience is good. It keeps you sane. It validates the process. It keeps you writing when feedback is slow. It keeps you pumping out words when rejections pile up. It teaches you craft. It instructs you in the industry’s process. It even keeps you alive when you know that what you’re writing is dull and uncertain. Patience is the ability to stay in the process without needing immediate proof that what you’re doing is working. If you look deeply, you’ll find that every great book, short story, or poem, every lasting career, was shaped by patient moments when the writer chose not to quit (even though there was no outside encouragement…or even balloons), not because it was easy, but because they patiently trusted the unseen work they saw unfolding before them.
Careers, especially those in the arts, have times when they are frozen. They don’t simply slow; they sometimes merely appear to stop. Drafts stall, inboxes go quiet, there’s no word on a submission, and the industry takes a lull. During these seasons, I’ve seen writers quit or search for what they think are faster ways to publish, even to their own detriment. Those who stay, though, find an interesting trajectory: in the stillness comes transformation. In these stretches where nothing seems to be happening, their craft suddenly deepens, their voice matures, and new stories seem to take root and then burrow in the quiet. The lesson from this is to stop measuring momentum and our standards of achievement only by visible results. Sometimes the most critical growth, as in plants, occurs in the roots of dormant trees during the quiet white of winter.
Impatience, possibly, is a pitiful cry for luck. Instead, it should be an intentional alignment with the natural rhythm of creative work. Books are written by daily attention, word by word; so are our lives. When we stop rushing growth, maybe trying to get the chick to hatch too quickly from the egg, and instead start trusting the timeline, we start looking inward. This frees us from comparison and the illusion of scarcity. If work is really the most important thing, which it is, progress is then measured by the best work we can produce, not by publication or other external markers. Maybe the mental shift here changes from the idea of “getting there” to the more productive mindset of “being here.”
To help yourself be patient, do as I do and keep a simple log of the hours you write, the pages you completed in revision, and the submissions you sent out. You’ll see that you’re busy and that things are moving forward. They may not be fireworks in the sky, but you are building fuses. Let the process, not external explosions, define your success.
To help with patience, change your goals. Instead of focusing on needing an agent while you’re writing your manuscript, look at your manuscript with complete focus and set goals like finishing the final revision in June so you can send it out, or if you have a finished manuscript, set the goal to query five agents this month. All of these are actionable and patient things that you can control.
If you want a reality check, research the timelines of your favorite authors. See how Grisham and King struggled in the early years. The lessons are dual: their careers took time, and they stuck with them even when nothing seemed to be happening, or, indeed, nothing welcome. Looking at these authors, you’ll find years, sometimes decades, of quiet work behind the scenes before the payoff was met. View yourself as the rule, not the exception. Play within the game’s rules and processes.
To ward off impatience, ask yourself what kind of writer you want to be in ten years. Change the mile marker. It’s not about now. It’s about ten years from now. Now, everything can naturally evolve towards that goal. Impatience becomes easier to quell. Let your choices today not be based upon deadline, but on alignment with that distant horizon, something that unfolds at your solid pace, not the hurried pace of someone else or your impatient self.
You may not realize it, but patience is a welcome, but hidden, contract between you and your future self. It’s what keeps your dreams alive long enough for them to mature, to hatch into reality. Every rejection, every rewrite, every waiting season is part of the process of refining you. No writing career I have ever heard of was based upon speed. It was built on stamina, devotion, and time spent faithfully returning to and refining the work.
Trust that the work you are doing today is already preparing you for the success you cannot yet see. Stay steady. The work you are writing and the life story you are creating will unfold when they are ready and when you are, as well.
Be patient and stay the course.
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