Julia McCitchen: The Writer's Journey from inspiration to publication - The writer's Journey, From inspiration to publication

Patience means the capacity to endure waiting, delay, or provocation without becoming angry or upset (Roget’s New Millennium Thesaurus).

Patience is required at many different levels on the Writer’s Journey both with yourself and with others.

Why is patience such an important quality for writers?

First of all, writing a book for publication is a long term business.

Despite the fact that there are always exceptions to the rule, there are very few books that are written and picked up by an agent or publisher straight away. The norm is for the process to take time.

The stage where patience is most required, and one of the most important for all writers seeking commercial publication, is finding the right people to work with – agent and/or publisher.

The reason that it takes so long for publishing professionals to respond to your approach is that they genuinely do have an extremely long list of other tasks on their ‘To Do’ list. And this is before they even get to assessing new projects from new authors!

Add this to fact that they are almost always in meetings and inundated with material to read, and you’ll begin to get the picture.

Ironically, once a decision is finally made, from that point onwards everything suddenly switches to tight deadlines where everything needs to be completed ‘yesterday’.

With self-publishing, the long term nature of successful publishing takes into account the whole life cycle of the book. In this situation you need patience to nurture your book to success long beyond the launch.

It requires patience to cultivate mutually rewarding working relationships with people who will help to sell, market and promote your book. It also takes patience to build up a strong relationship with your readers that is likely to be rewarded by them buying your next book too.

Life has a way of taking the time required for projects to come to fruition – whatever that may be – rather than an arbitrary timeframe you may have decided you want to impose.

Usually, there is a bigger picture at work – if only you could see it then and there.

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