In The Demon's Head: Why Patience Is A Virtue

In The Demon's Head #53: Why Patience is a Virtue

August 21, 2012

Hello everyone how are you this afternoon. I'm coming to you once again from the couch in my living room and highly enjoying the weather and this day off from my real job so I thought what a better way to spend some time today then to talk to you all of my readers about different things.

Before we launch into the full on of today's edition, I'd like to take a moment and tell you about the new free writing for August for your reading pleasure. “Mind of Madness” a short piece that will be complete with some artwork from Tom, my neighborhood art designer. I'll have that piece up later this afternoon.

Either way I'll move into the meat of this edition, I'd like to explain why patience is a virtue as it comes to your writing. There are a number of ways that I could explain this but it's mainly coming down to the final process, because let's face it writing doesn't require patience.

Now when I say that I don't mean that the writing process itself doesn't take patience, I'm not talking about formulating and plotting ideas because I understand that does take some patience and time, what I mean is when you sit down to write you don't want to take time to think, you write, write and write some more. Write until your fingers go numb and you forget why you started writing in the first place. What I'm referring to is everything after that.

Your editing is the first stop. I know a lot of people believe that you can just jump right into editing a book or story as soon as it's finished but this couldn't be further from the truth. The reason they say let everything sink away for a while before you begin editing is because they want you to take a moment to let everything disappear. This allows you to approach the piece with a fresh set of eyes that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

Another aspect, especially in today's world of self-publishing dominance is publishing before your ready. I made this mistake a few years ago and attempted to publish my first short story on Amazon with no real knowledge of what I was doing and without editing it first. This made the story not only bad, but it was bad and people knew it so it never sold a copy, on top of that I wasn't confident with it which made things worse. What I'm getting at here is that you never want to rush into the publishing aspect of things, should you tend to do that you will end up putting something up that isn't your best work and everyone will realize that.

Another thing where patience is a needed tool is in platform building. Now I understand that everyone wants to sell their books and understandably so, I do as well, but you can't do it without a platform. This was another mistake I made, I didn't have an established platform at all and it showed. The message for my story didn't get outside of the small circle of people that I knew and that lead to no one buying the story.

What I'm getting at here is that there are ways to go about things when it comes to your writing. But sit down, pace yourself, and slow down, you never want to rush into anything, it could cost you a lot more then you realize in the long run. You always want your best stuff out there and available and the only way that's going to happen is if you allow yourself the patience to give it your best shot. 

Have you ran into any problems where patience has cost you, or a situation where it's helped you improve your writing? I'd love for you to share that in the comments section below.  

That does it for this edition of “In The Demon's Head” I'd like to remind you that you can connect with me on all aspects of Social Media as well as have the blog directly emailed to you by signing up for the mailing list and receiving my free “Promotional Techniques” E-Book here or by signing up with your email address above. You can send me questions via email and I'll be sure to get back to you.

There won't be a general update this week as I'm starting a “Story Art” blogging series talking about how to formulate and put together a story and that starts Friday and will continue through next week. Until the next time you want to take a trip through the gates of hell and into the demon's head, I'm Kyle Robinson wishing you a safe trip back to the surface.