Consistency is the Goal to Meet Your Goals

I think that just about anyone can agree that the key to success in most things is consistency.

I talked about this a bit in my post about New Year’s Resolutions, because it really is a universal principle. Practice makes permanent as my English teacher says, and it really does. One of the number one thing that people look for when hiring employees is consistency. They want people who will be excellent and continue to be excellent.

Now I have never been the best at starting habits. It’s hard. I forget, I get lazy, other things get in the way. And not all things require it. Some things are just things you bang out in one sitting, you don’t need to do the same thing every single day. You know how I said in New Year’s Resolution to edit for 20 minutes every day? Hasn’t happened. But I have started posting pretty consistently every Friday. Sure I skip a week here or there, but for the most part I usually manage to get something up.

Trust me, if I could tell you what made the difference or what it was that made it so I did one and not the other, I would use that secret all the time and would soon become the perfect person. Two weeks ago I started writing in my journal, and have since done so every night since. Do I know why it worked this time and not the 5 billion other times I’ve tried to start a habit of writing in a journal? No clue!

But I do know that most of the really cool things I’ve managed to accomplish writing wise have happened because I’ve been stubborn about consistency.

I think we can all say getting a novel itself requires some measure of sheer headed stubbornness. You have to refuse to let the writer's block get the best of you or keep working even when you want to do anything else. 

There is a set of stories that I write online, and I’ve updated them almost every single Sunday for the past two and a half years. Most chapters are 2000 words or more. I’ve all together written nearly 300,000 words for that story. And I’ve gotten quite a few fans off it, several of whom have told me that if I ever chose to write a full length novel they would be interested in checking it out.

Writing this blog once every Friday. Usually most writing bloggers say to update once a day or two days, and while we're not quite there (baby steps, baby steps), writing once a week has actually done a lot to the number of people visiting the blog. It’s not exactly about to become one of the most popular writing blogs ever, in fact when you Google search “Blog for young writers by young writers” which is the tag line for this blog, it doesn’t show up in the first five pages. But if you search “Two books before twenty” it is the first option!

It hasn’t always been.

Now there is a measure of quality. Quality is also very important. Even if I updated every single day and Margaret updated every other day so that some days we had two posts, it wouldn’t mean much unless we had a post that actually attracted people’s attention. And you have to have quality to keep people there/here.

But then again… there are a lot of people who manage to make a lot of money without writing anything spectacular, but they write a lot of it. John Grisham has written more or less the same lawyer story 20 times. Most of the “Kindle Millionaires” (people who have made a million or more dollars selling e-books) aren’t writing anything that would change the world of writing forever (if they weren’t making a lot of money off it online)… but they are writing a lot of it.

Consistency matters. You can hide writing skills that aren’t the best with consistency. But you certainly can’t hide inconsistency with good writing. All the best writing in the world will mean nothing if you can’t finish the book.

Of course the best solution is to have both. That’s the best way to go. But you have to have consistency and persistency.