Successful writers have this quality

Do you?

Did you know, in my teens and twenties, I was a competitive figure skater?

I trained for hours each week.

▶ 5am starts before school and college.

👀Long weekends on and off ice.

😒Hours of running around the outside of the rink with my arms up—have you tried running with your arms out? It’s damn hard.

🎯And then there were the hundreds of spins and jumps. Repeating moves over and over until they were perfect, but not before failing to land them for months.

It hurts falling on ice.

And everyone I trained with fell a lot. My knees were black with bruises.

In fact, we had a saying:

"If you don't have bruises you aren't trying hard enough".

I got pretty mentally tough.

Why am I telling you about this?

Because it’s the same in writing

In writing you need mental toughness and discipline.

There's a lot of rejection and knock backs in the writing world.

But if you want to succeed, you have to keep sending your work out there again and again.

Even when it feels like you’ll never land a gig!

You have to take the bruising to your ego—because if you don’t have any bruises you’re not trying hard enough.

Take a moment, and then try again.

The writers who can keep picking themselves back up, are the ones who eventually land the jumps.

I don’t think I would have been able to do either on my own though, figure skating or writing.

Mentors, coaches, writing groups, and even the Twitter writing community all help to keep me motivated.

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I loved spending time with some of you writing together last week in S20! We’ll definitely be doing that again.

And mid-May another Writing Club will be starting.

Until then, come say hi on Twitter or LinkedIn. I’d love to hear about the writing gigs or skills you’re trying to land.