“Courage is nothing more than taking one step more than you think you can.”
I don’t know who said that, but I learned from it.
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Every week, when I search for something to say about courage, I am confronted with what courage is and what it is not. Courage really isn’t about feeling or not feeling fear. It has nothing to do with doing great deeds (though sometimes great deeds are the product of courage). While courage can be helpful in conquering life-and-death situations, you don’t actually have to conquer those situations to display courage.
At root, courage is a form of tenacity, a refusal to quit when even when you’re exhausted, humiliated or broken. In that sense, it is as necessary in everyday life as it is in moments of great upheaval. Everyday courage may be more important than the ‘great deeds’ sort of course, because every one of us will be in everyday situations, while not all of us will be called upon in our lifetimes to perform great deeds.
This week, I’m formatting Mirklin Wood, the next in series after The Willow Branch, and it’s got me thinking about every day courage, because a writer who lacks courage will never succeed as author.
Before you start to laugh and call me “silly”, let’s examine what goes into authoring a novel. It is first and foremost an attempt to sell the products of your mind to a world that doesn’t care right now whether you exist. You’re going to strip your soul naked and parade it in front of an audience that might include editors and agents, publishers and readers. While you are reaching out to editors, agents and publishers, you’re going to fail. Over and over and over again, you are going to send out queries and they are going to come back with impersonal rejection letters … if you’re lucky … or, if you’re exceptionally talented, with the occasional signed memo that reads “This isn’t for us, but keep trying with others.” You are going to sit in a darkened room staring at your words wondering what you’re missing and doubting that you should keep trying.
Successful authors take one step more than they think they can, and then one step more after that, and another after that. Eventually you will sell something. You’ll get paid. You’ll ‘succeed.’ Your story or your book will enter the marketplace, and maybe you’ll do well with it, or maybe you won’t. In either case, let’s say you keep going. You sell again.
Or you could follow me into self-publishing. I got tired of being courageous in soft-rejection … “this isn’t for us, but keep trying with others.” I decided to stop the frustration of dealing with publishers and agents. So along with writing my own book, I do my own cover art, layout, editing, copyediting, uploading, selling, and promoting. I plan to someday be able to afford to hire out a few of those jobs, but in the meantime ….
Independent authors invest in themselves, in their ability to know what is good and to tell a story worth reading. We risk rejection by trying to reach readers directly, hoping to entertain them enough so they will not only like our first effort, but like it enough to search for our later works.
Even when you succeed, you will still fail. There will be hostile reviews, comments from critics questioning your talent, your vocation, your species. I once got a review on a writer’s website that made me cry (for the record, I am not easily prone to tears). These will, if you’re lucky, come interspersed with glowing reviews, a nice sell-through, an offer from your editor to buy the next thing you’re doing, or even a call from a publisher. The good times will run in parallel with the pain and will never really balance one another. I delight in the good reviews and am always hurt by the bad ones … for a moment.
Like me, if you want to be a successful author, you’ll take another few steps, and these seem easier. You do more books, find an audience, settle into a flow. You keep writing, keep selling, get fan mail, generate some nice reviews, be asked to speak at the local writers’ group, and become (as much as any writer ever does) a celebrity in your field. Even when you’ve reached your own definition of success, you will never leave the struggle behind. Every story and every book is another chance to fail just exactly as much as it is another chance to succeed. Every new level of success raises the bar higher, making failure more public and more painful … and more likely. Every day is a challenge, and every day requires courage.
Failure and success are as inseparably linked as inhaling is linked to exhaling. You cannot have one without the other, though you can live a safe life and have neither.
Courage is standing at the bottom of the mountain, knowing that the climb is going to hurt like hell and that you might never reach the top, and climbing anyway. Courage is saying “One more step. Just one more step,” when hands, knees and heart are bleeding. Courage is saying that you might let yourself quit tomorrow, but that you’re going to hang in today, just for now… and forgetting the next day is always today, and the next moment is always now.
Yeah, that’s my love of hiking in the Alaska mountains speaking, but the two are similar. I’ve done my share of failing, and I have the scars to show for it. It looks like there’s as much mountain above me as there ever was. When I look back, I can see that I’ve covered a surprising amount of ground, every bit of it one step at a time, but I haven’t reached the summit. I think it’s been worth the climb. .Part of the beauty comes from having survived the pain. If it were easy, it wouldn’t be any fun.
This is only world of writing that exists. Every writer climbs the same mountain, each by our own path. It takes courage, but it only takes the sort of courage everybody can have—the courage not to quit when quitting would be the easy thing to do. There’s no heroics — no burning buildings or rescuing drowning children from shark-infested waters. You won’t even have to hang by your fingertips like the young lady above. It’s everyday courage — taking one more step — as if you’re climbing a mountain on your own two feet. Remember to keep your head up, brush the dirt off your face and pick the gravel out of your palms when you fall, and know that every other person who climbed the mountain has done the same thing.
May you have the courage to fail, because it is the courage to succeed.
