Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Have a "Galaxy Quest" mentality

A couple of encouraging things today, both for me, and for any other aspiring authors out there who might be reading this.

A quote from Ira Glass:

"Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through."

. . .

It takes 10,000 hours of practice, and you'll become an expert at anything you really work at.
More here: http://www.squidoo.com/10000-hour-rule



Oddly enough, it's encouraging for me to hear things like this, and that Brandon Sanderson wrote 13 different novels before he got one published.

Why does this encourage me? After reading all the odds of getting published, it's nice to here at least somewhere that hard work will be rewarded. Oh, and the title of this post? One of the quotes from the movie Galaxy Quest: "Never give up, never surrender!"

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