Slow and Steady Wins the Race!

The famous phrase--





"Slow and steady wins the race." - Aesop




Is so very true... and if you don't believe me, then that's your loss, you're the one who'll be bitchin' and whingin' when you're a bottom feeder.



As a writer there a no short cuts (exception - having a parent who is a famous author/writer).... there is no such thing as an overnight success, so stop clogging the Facebook groups with your sob stories of how you didn't make the sales you were expecting. Sorry for that outburst, but come on guys, you didn't really expect this career path to be easy, did you?


You might be asking me how I know so much about writing or self-publishing, I have after all not published anything. You're right, I haven't published anything, and yet, people seem to listen to me, and just because you are published it doesn't mean that you're better than me... heck, anyone can publish these days... it's the wise ones who hang on to their work... like Aesop said, Slow and steady wins the race.



If it was up to me... Lumen would already be out... but it's not up to me, it's up to Lumen, and it's telling me that it's not finished yet, it needs to be edited, it needs to have extra scenes... it needs a lot of stuff that can't be rushed... and the reason why it needs all of this stuff... is because I rushed it in the first place.



When I say that I rushed it, I do not mean that I wrote it really fast, because I'm a fast writer, I can touch type so 1,000 words an hour is kind of the norm. I mean that I didn't plan much of it, I just headed in and bashed out a 60,000 word mess.




Joseph's 3-Steps to Taking it Slow ;)




PLAN: let all your excitement out about writing through this... brainstorming should be one of the creative stages. If you don't know what you're going to be writing then you'll be going all over the place, writing off tangents etc. if you plan, there is a [insert high percentage here] that your book/short story won't suck.




WRITE-IT-ALL: I don't care how long you take... but you need to get it all written up before you even dare go back to the beginning and have a play around with it. We all type at our different speeds, but hopefully planning will set those demons at bay and you won't get stuck for anything to write... so write it all down.




GET AN EDITOR: I know you can edit your own writing, if you couldn't then you wouldn't be much of a writer, I mean, I love editing, you might hate it... it's a job, you have to do things that you hate. End of. If you don't get someone whose job it is... as a profession... to edit your writing then you might just fall flat on your face. Don't publish anything without having someone first look over it. (except a blog post... nobody ever looks over my posts LOL)




And for a bonus step!


BE CRITICAL! Let's face it, you're absolutely shit... I'm crap, I know this, I'm just better than the people who don't do anything about it. Get a red pen to everything... ideas, writing, even your attitude.




What did you think of this post?


I took on board what you guys said about loving how personal I get in my posts... so this is fairly personal, but I'm also trying to get you guys to admit the same flaws in yourself.




Are you ready to take it slow and steady?



-Joseph

(Disclaimer: I know that some people aren't planners, and that's okay, I still love you.)

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