How passionate are you about your craft?

Would you write if you gained no readers? If it cost and not paid. If it took years for your first book and more years for your second. In the beginning, you bragged about your writing, but now you don't want to talk about it. Did someone ridicule your writing? You sent out your manuscripts and received one, two, a dozen or more rejections?

Would you still write if someone in authority said you had no talent? Would you keep on going forward, pushing and pushing? Would keep on going if you knew for certain it would be years after your death, before your books were discovered. What if your book sold only one copy but that one copy changed that one person’s life? Would you still write?

If you answered yes, you are a writer. The ranks of history are full of those who labored all their lives without recognition. Who were rejected time and time again. Those who borrowed because they couldn’t sell what they had written Yet they continued writing, honing their craft. They left the naysayers in the dust. Their critics like puppies barking at their heels. Still, they persisted. Not quitting, not giving up on their dream. Their passion not financial or for recognition, but because they loved the craft. Because to them their words come alive. Because if their book changed, no one else’s life it has changed their own.

So keep at it. Pull the words from the depths of your soul when they don't come. When the rejections roll in. When You feel you want to wipe out everything you have written. At the worst of times, write in the best of times write. You are a writer, write