The Importance of the Non-Glamorous

Reading glamorous success stories can be so attractive and addictive.

We look at brilliant musicians and say we wish we were gifted like that. We admire great art and lament we aren’t artistic. We read books, view sculptures, gawk at inventions, and marvel at math… and we think we could never do that.

We think this brilliance and beauty somehow comes easily.

That writers are magically born writers and the stories just burst forward effortlessly. That musicians and engineers and painters are gifted with something that makes their work simple and always free from trouble.

We don’t want to think about the work that may be involved.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s work.

We’d like to ignore the non-glamorous parts and just think of the overnight successes, the prodigies, and the finished products.

Yet most of writing is work that starts off messy. Most of it happens little by little, day by day.

Even breakout success stories started somewhere. (Spoiler: it probably included a lot of work.)

If we expect writing to always be easy and glamorous then we’ll get discouraged when we find it hard. And it is often hard.

And yet when we accept that writing is hard and we keep moving forward, the non-glamorous moments can add up.

Whether it’s 10,000 hours of practice, daily writing habits, or just not giving up- the minutes and hours of work and practice turn into something more.

Small steps (no matter how boring of a chore it may seem at times) can still bring you closer to your goal.

It’s the pages of scribbles that will one day be a story. The research that provides inspiration. The painstaking revisions that leads to a clean copy.

If we’re writing because we think it will always be fun, we won’t get too far.

But the work is worth it.

For all you out there just trying to do the best you can- good for you. It may not all be pretty and it certainly isn’t all easy, but it’s all a win.

And who knows? Maybe we’ll get a glamorous moment or two down the road somewhere after all 😉