Diligence Leads to Profit
The month of November is National Novel Writers Month, and this is the first time that I will be participating in it as a writer. I have not written anything this long, probably in my life!
Back when I was in high school, I wrote for fun some detective books that were lazy and fun. Lazy in the sense that I borrowed the names and personalities of everyone around me, and fun in that I enjoyed doing it. It was a blend of mystery and sci-fi that fit me at the time, where I had no idea where it would go next, and I had to rejigger things in order to make it all work because my story definitely had to have time travel in it.
Looking back, I am pretty embarrassed by some of what’s in there, and yet there are times when I could easily be talked into trying to update some of that stuff– if I ever thought that anyone would want to read it. Having real people’s names in there… definitely an issue.
Which brings me to the Proverb from today:
The plans of the diligent certainly lead to profit,
Proverbs 21:9
but anyone who is reckless certainly becomes poor.
One of the things that you’re supposed to do with NaNoWriMo is have a good plan– and, well, that hasn’t ever been me in my writings. Usually, I have a good idea, and get more ideas as I go along. Sometimes I have an outline, but I’m usually along for the ride in the stories as much as I hope the reader will be.
My daughter went with a totally different tactic– working out a full plan. She knows where her story will go, and though there are times when we’re both discouraged, wondering how we’re going to get to 50,000 words1 or whether anyone will want to read something we wrote, she told me last night as we were writing together that I should have had one too.
And she’s probably right. Because if you are diligent, if you’ll stick to the plan and see it all the way through, it will lead to profit. That profit may be a new discipline in getting things started and completed. It may be that you get to spend quality time doing something you enjoy. It may even be that someone likes or buys the book you wrote.
The important thing is to be diligent and have a plan.
- You can see and monitor my progress in the sidebar! [↩]
