Pages

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Use last year's writing Failures to Build this year's Successes


Recently, I ran across Keli Gwyn's blog, Romance Writers on the Journey, where she interviewed some 200 (give or take--I round numbers) aspiring romance writers between the years of 2008 and 2012. She ended the blog when she signed her own first book contract. Kudos to Keli for creating such a fine resource, and also for her recent good news--a second book contract, with Love Inspired Historical. I don't know Keli, but I felt a literal rush of happiness for her when I read this.

Romance Writers on the Journey is filled with author and wanna-be-author interviews, as well as a wealth of information about writing itself. But what I want to talk about are the numbers. Of the 200 people she interviewed, most were "on the contest circuit," meaning that their writing had reached a level of competence that the writers felt they wouldn't be embarrassing themselves and wasting their time/money by competing in RWA contests. Many had been finalists in, or won, various RWA contests.

I have read every single interview, and of those 200 people, only about 20 have gone on to become traditionally published. That's only 10%. Of the remaining 180, I discovered that only 10% are even still blogging. Now, I don't know if they've given up on their dream, but they have given up on blogging.

The point I want to make is this one by Winston Churchill:
 Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
Given that, I decided to think about my writing successes and failures last year with regard to the facet of entering RWA contests. There are so many facets to the writing life, if I noted my successes and failures in all of them, this post would end up being very long. If you're interested in reading specifically what I learned, and can't read the small print, click on the image and it will become a readable size.


    So, have you taken a look at your writing failures last year, and figured out a way to leverage them to build your eventual success?




Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...