5. Be Persistent

My fifth "Be" is persistance.

I know I need this as much as everyone else does out in the writing world.

With writing, it is easy to give up. It is very hard to get your work noticed. But persistance is the key to it all. With any career really, persistance makes it all worth while in the end. It makes you feel as if you have accomplished something huge.

In writing, you want to be persistant but not to a point where it will drive you insane and time becomes unmanageable and you end up hospitalized from stress. That's just down right crazy in being persistant.

To start off with this a writer first needs persistance in their story idea. You have to believe in it and your characters to keep going. If you work on an idea you don't believe in--nothing will come out of it. It will be bland. That persistance to finish a bland idea doesn't pay off.

If you work on an idea that you believe in and can be published--that persistance pays off. As long as you work with it.

The biggest thing that is needed with persistance is the time to write. Create that time. Some famous authors have set schedules for writing every day. Others do it during the National Novel Writing Month held in November so that they have more time to edit. But no matter how you create the time--time is what is needed most in writing. Without it, a story cannot be born. You can keep on thinking your story is an awesome idea and belive in it and that someday it can be published but without that time created to write it all down, that story will not come to pass.

Along with being humble and learning more of your craft, there is persistance in this as well to perfect your craft. You can't become "perfect" overnight. No one is. Keep learning, keep writing, keep making time to learn.

One last thing about persistance. Querying to agents is tough. I have sent some a long time ago with a short story I wrote in my college creative writing course as the final for the class. They were all rejected. I had promise with one but it didn't go far at all. I didn't mind because I didn't want that story published because I didn't feel it really should have been. But with persistance, I have now written a full length novel and with more persistance I can get through editing and then sending it out to publishers and agents.

I know of a couple people who have been rejected so many times with querying to agents. Most people...give up. They believe their work will never make it after so many rejections. But only those who actually keep in their persistance and keep sending those queries out and keep editing their story with advice from peers...those are the ones that will be published in the end because they kept going and didn't get discouraged.