17 Years Is A Long Time To Do Anything
A Little Motivation For A January Morning
Today, I received an email from an old writing website, saying it was 17 years ago that I first created an account. Though I haven’t used that site since 2011, something about that impersonal, automated email made me stop and think…
17 years!
That’s a long time to be doing anything!
…and I’ve been writing fiction for 17 years.
10’000 hours to become an expert, that’s the saying right? 17 years sure passes that benchmark.
Neil Gaiman once said; that when you finish a story, you should put it away for a few days and come back to it later with fresh eyes. When you’ve almost forgotten what you wrote, you can pick out the bits of magic you couldn’t see before.
Reading back through my old work, it’s heavy on the teen angst and college heartbreak drama, but buried in all that nonsense, there are a few sentences that stand out. A few snippets that sound like me. Whatever a writer’s voice is, whatever it’s made up of, I can hear little bits of the way I write now jumping off the page. A few sentences, in a mess of jumbled plot lines and clunky characters, that shine a little brighter.
And that got me thinking.
17 years. For 17 years I have been writing ridiculous fiction and stream-of-consciousness prose. For 17 years I have been escaping reality by writing fantasy. I’ve done many things in that time: been to places I love, met people I love, become a person I’ve grown to love. And through it all, consistently, I’ve been writing. In a way, that makes me more of a writer than I am a medic. More a writer than a musician. More a writer than a snowboarder, a traveler or a D&D nerd. Of all the things I consider myself, I have been a writer longer than any other.
I’m not saying that simply existing is an achievement, getting older happens to the best of us. But what I find intriguing, and honestly motivating, is that those 300’000 words I wanted to write last year to “get the bad words out”, the 10’000 hours of practice one needs to master a skill, I’ve already done it. Sure, much of my past writing was terrible, but it all goes on the heap of a profession practiced. A skill refined. Hours and days and years, of putting in the work. Of putting one word in front of another. Of starting with a blank page and creating something that wasn’t there when I started.
So next time you’re feeling like an impostor, wondering if you have any talent, worried that your creative dream will forever remain out of reach- pause that thought for a moment, and think about all the work you’ve already done to get to this point.
Just because you weren’t getting paid for it, doesn’t make your previous work any less productive, any less vital to the artist you’ve become. No one rolls out of bed and becomes an artist in a day, and even if this is the first time you’re attempting to get paid for the work you do, this is not the first time you have ever created something.
Maybe you’re hoping to transition into a new medium. Maybe you want to go freelance or turn a current passion into a career. Whatever your goals and wherever you want your journey to take you, you have done this before. In some way, in some capacity. And you are already doing something that no one else can do.
No one else writes like you. No one else paints like you. No one else dances, draws or creates like you. And no one else is inspired like you.
This may not be reflected in your previous work history. You might not have relevant qualifications or a ready-to-go portfolio, but don’t discount your artistic journey just because you can’t write in on a CV. You have passion. You have experience. Use it.
January is a time for reflection. A time for motivation, for looking back and planning ahead. Clearly, I’ve received automated reminder emails like this before, but for some reason, it meant something today. Like when you listen to a song you’ve heard a thousand times, but suddenly something clicks and you finally understand the lyrics, and it’s as if you’re hearing it for the first time.
Maybe it’s the cold mountain morning, or the year lying ahead, but a simple, trash email that should have gone straight to junk, made me smile today, far more than it had any right to.
So take a look at your own journey. Spend a minute thinking of how far you’ve come.
Getting to where you want to be is going to take work, take practice, take direction. But sometimes, it’s the things we don’t plan, the things we do by accident, by chance, simply because we want to, that show us who we are.
