I’m re-reading The Write Attitude by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, a collection of blog posts she wrote about the difference between a professional writer and a wannabe writer.
Chapter 4, “Getting By,” smacked me in the face, in a good way. She writes about a job, early in her career, where she found she was able to complete a day’s work in about a half-hour, so she was constantly asking for more stuff to do.
After a few days of this, she was confronted by three people who had the same job and told her to slow down, stretch the work over eight hours like they did, because she was making them look bad. She couldn’t do that, it’s not in her DNA to “just get by.”
Rusch goes on to describe writers she has discovered are “just getting by,” and, well, I looked at what she wrote, and then I looked in the mirror, and I said, “Uh oh.”
Rusch concludes:
“The only way to achieve your writing dreams is to work on them—and even for those of us who don’t skate through life, that work is hard.
“It’s also fun—and, it would seem to me, a lot more fun than just getting by.”
I’m going to leave this thought there and get to work. If you want to learn more, read her whole post or, better yet, get the book.