You cannot trust your day-in and day-out feelings about your creative work. These are no gauge. They are no metric. They are far too fickle.  They will jerk you around. Instead, you must trust the discipline and process of doing the work. The routine of sitting down each day and bearing up the required elements of time and attention. You must trust your God-bestowed creative capabilities.

Creative work is not analytical. Creative work is not reasoned, planned, and executed. It operates differently. Creative work moves like an approaching weather front or walking into a room of people you’ve never met. You can only be present and react. The outcome remains to be seen, and is certain to be different than what you imagined.

My writing, when first born, is a very ugly baby. Seriously. You don’t see the first draft of anything. If you did you would say, “Mercy, Dave, that is a very ugly baby,” to which I would reply, “I know, this is what I tried to tell you in my 15 December blogpost.” But this doesn’t mean no one sees the ugly babies I produce. (Recognizing I’ve exhausted the metaphor I’ll now move on.) 

I have a first reader, a first editor, a collaborator who sniffs out the rotten and ill-wrought in my writing and ensures that I don’t single-handedly wreak creative havoc. She tells me if something is working and she tells me if it’s not. She knows what bad writing looks like and ensures that whatever leaves my desk––correspondence, reviews, novels, and, yes, blogposts—are of a quality that will avoid both my embarrassment and reader regret.

She has been doing this for twenty years. She’s read more bad writing than an adjunct community college composition professor. And she always does it willingly and thoughtfully. She has turned it into a labor of love. Thank you to my wife, CKM, for her support on and off the page. My work would have self-detonated long, long ago were she not looking over my shoulder. Thank her, dear reader; she is doing you a great deal of good.

There are many skills a writer needs. Many of them are obvious. All can be learned. Some are learned whether one plans to write creatively or not. They are not all needed at the beginning. Many are learned just in time, as the writer recognizes his need for them. This is the nature of learning to do creative work. Primary among these skills is the skill of waiting. While writing and waiting are done in parallel—they’d better be, if one is to achieve a body of work at all—the waiting the writer learns to do is just as present and persistent as the writing; it is a secondary craft. 

There is the waiting as manuscripts are read by beta readers and agents. Then there is the waiting while these same manuscripts are read by publishers—hopefully by several at a time. One’s creative work goes out the door and into this world of necessary critical readers and all the time the writer—still at home writing—has no idea how his work is fairing, whether it is being read or waiting to be read or if word on its future will arrive tomorrow, this week, next month. Or perhaps never. And if one is successful, there is the waiting as a book is created, as others practice and perfect their own literary and creative crafts. Waiting is a skill to be done well and done with intention. Good writing leads to waiting.

It is important to note that a writer does not wait to write. There had better not be waiting for inspiration or waiting for an idea. The writer fails if he waits until he has time to write. For if he does, he is no writer at all. These waitings lead nowhere. They are dead ends.

So, the productive writer waits. He waits after and while he writes. And he learns another skill—not to focus on the waiting, but to focus on the work.