You know when you’re writing, writing, writing, and you look up and notice that four months of the year have passed by?
Yeah, that.
A couple of months ago, my agent recommended that I read Elizabeth Strout’s My Name is Lucy Barton. The book was long-listed for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and is every bit as good as the praise you might have heard for it. Strout herself won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for her equally gripping Olive Kitteridge. I became an immediate Strout fan, looking up videos on YouTube of her speaking and reading her older works.
It was painful, when I closed the covers of her first novel and sighed in satisfaction, the realization that I could write every day for the next thirty years and still not be able to reach Strout’s level of skill and mastery.
But then I thought about it some more—because that’s what you do when you’re lying under the covers at 2am pondering what you’ve done with your life and how you’ve wasted it—and you know, I almost laughed at how silly it was that I should beat myself up for not being at a level of mastery of a Pulitzer winner when I’ve only been writing fiction on and off for a few years. Why should I be able to match Strout, or anyone else’s level of mastery, after all? She’s been writing fiction consistently for more years than I’ve been alive. She has been perfecting sentences and rhythms, creating characters, working in worlds unfamiliar to her for over three decades. I have not.
It might take me the same thirty years to reach Strout’s level of mastery. It might take me fifty. It may take me only five. I may never get there at all.
But that’s not even the point.
The point isn’t to reach Strout’s level of mastery, as much as I love and adore her and can’t wait to get my hands on her next book. The point is to reach my own level of mastery and keep topping that each month and each year.
I realized I was asking the wrong questions, getting frustrated with the wrong problems.
The real questions, the only questions, are: What do I want? What do I need to be doing consistently to reach that, five days or five years from now? Am I happy with my effort? Am I happy with this path that I’m on?
If yes, that’s all that matters. If not, I need to make changes.
This is, of course, something I’ve been telling my students for years. A big part of building a career in any field is knowing, but the other part is doing. Knowing what to do but not doing it is as detrimental as doing everything you can without knowing the skills and the strategies. In our courses at The International Freelancer, I put a stress both on the knowing and the doing. I give exercises and action steps and I can prod and poke, but in the end, you have to be the one to do the work.
This is where it gets interesting. The work has to come first, and often without reward. That’s just the nature of a writing and freelancing career, and it’s something you must accept. But if you keep learning and if you keep doing, the results do come.
I’ve seen it time and time again with students in all of my courses, especially 30 Days, 30 Queries and Content Marketing for Journalists. The ones who keep at it consistently—sending queries, building their websites, following editors on Twitter, etc.—will start noticing things, finding unique angles, seeing through the stories everyone else is pitching to find something different, in ways that cannot be taught.
They develop an instinct.
The instinct comes from learning, initially, but then it comes from a whole lot of doing. Years for some, months for others, merely weeks for a dedicated few. But the more they do, the stronger the instinct becomes, the easier it feels.
I’ve taught this for years. Yet, I forgot it when it came to my own fiction.
That night, however, lying in bed, I could feel just how much easier fiction has been in the last year to when I started. I can see how much better my writing has gotten, even over the last few months. When I’ve committed to it, stuck to it, taken courses to better my craft, and treated it like it’s something I care about, to be practiced with focus, my relationship to it has changed. We understand each other better now.
Learning is important. It’s why I am such a champion for the courses I run at The International Freelancer. I know they work. The results are there for you to see for yourself. I’m biased, of course, but I think they’re the best courses out there for freelancers who’re serious about not just an income, but a career they can be proud of. I’m also a believer in doing. That’s why I bake action steps into the courses themselves.
Both are essential. Whether it’s pitching to The New York Times or writing a novel, you need to know how to do it and then you have to keep doing it. You must make the time and financial investment in your learning. You must do the work.
It adds up.
It may take me three decades to get to the level I want. Which makes it even more essential that I delay no longer and start today.
What will it take for you to reach your level of mastery? Are you working on that today?