Long-Term Goals for Long-Term Results

This art form writers love to dabble in is a long game.

Perhaps you won’t make it in the first five years of trying it out.

Maybe you’re willing to wait ten or fifteen years to make it. That’s the proper mindset to have. At least, in this writer’s opinion.

Your first book probably won’t be the one you make it with.

It may not even be your tenth book.

But it won’t be any of your books if you don’t step up to the plate and bat.

Maybe you won’t hit a home run the first time.

Or, more likely, you’ll hit the ball, and your first book will take you to first base, then subsequent books will eventually guide you home again.

Switching gears, we’ve all seen the AI boogeyman, too, which teaches those who’d rather give up at the start to not keep going. AI is terrible at writing. I don’t see the reason for the fear.

A machine will never replace a human being in the arts, seeing as it has no soul.

The thing is, AI doesn’t work hard. It only finds by algorithms and an artificial learning process.

Hard work is working full time, then working full time some more on your own fiction afterward, doing what you want to do for a living outside of your normal work.

AI doesn’t know what it means to sacrifice everything to reach those goals.

I wouldn’t worry about it.

For me, the long game is what I’m playing. I am a patient man, willing to wait decades for what it is I want. It might be my faith background that has taught me the value of waiting, but the truth is the people who make it at something never give up.

They may have failed to succeed, and it may never have been seen.

We all know the surface-level story, not the hardship that went into that result.

My long-term goal is to have fifty books written by 2032.

The odds are ever in our favor (writing reference) if we keep at it and don’t stop.

I have hundreds of ideas. Some of them might be odd and quirky, but that’s the type of story I want to tell.

But the passion for writing gets those stories on the page. I look at my stories and go, “I can’t wait to spend time with you.”

Writers are a strange bunch. We spend all our time with people that don’t exist, who do things that never happened, and we enjoy every second.

I hope someone enjoys it, at least.

There’s no point in writing stories if you’re not having a blast doing it.

It’s still working, though. But it’s the type of work you want to get into.

Maybe your book takes seven drafts, or maybe it takes one prolonged process where you polish each page for fifty passes until, when you’re done, you’ve got your novel with minimal editing.

There’s no right way. But there’s a right way for me. And there’s a right way for you.

But to bring it home, I believe to succeed at anything giving up must not be an option.

One day, I hope to have the credentials to be able to say this to people and have it stick with them.

One day, if I am tenacious, I’d like to have stories out there that change lives, as cliché as that may be.

I want someone to shed a tear, to feel warm, and to know that dreams are achievable.

Whether that’s in a year, or in eleven, I have my long-term process and desires at the forefront of my mind.

I will continue to play the long game, and, with enough drive and refusal to give up, my long-term goals will shift into a long-term reality, even if it’s a long distance away.

And who knows?

The future might come sooner than I imagine.