What Does It Take to Be Great?

As an aspiring writer, it can often feel tiresome to watch others succeed while you continue to work toward goals that feel impossible to achieve.

It’s possibly one of the greatest frustrations to endure in this space — a daunting combination of waiting for your work to yield rewards and wondering how those around you continue to get what you want. Because while they may very well deserve their success and you should be happy for them, don’t you deserve a win and for someone else to be happy for you, too?

Professional Writing Has Never Been Fair

So-called “winning” as a writer is as much about connections and privilege as it is about putting the work in to earn the success you so desire. One of the greatest challenges for aspiring and working writers is finding that tough balance between knowing and interacting with the “right” people, proving that you deserve even the opportunity to succeed, and, honestly, being in the right place at the right time with the right idea for the exact right person.

It’s not about fair — it’s NEVER been about fair. The truth is that no writer is more deserving of success than another. You may have a wonderful, unique story idea and the clips to prove you’re the best person to write that story, but technically speaking, that doesn’t somehow make you special or more entitled to the wins you’re after. This doesn’t mean you don’t deserve the chance to win, or that you’re not good enough to pull it off. The reality: You and a dozen other writers may be equally deserving and “good enough.”

So what, then? What does it take to be the one the powers that be pick from the masses to succeed in writing?

What It Takes: Resilience

There are MANY good writers out there with the potential to be great, all equally deserving of the achievements they’re tirelessly working toward. But what sets those destined for success apart from the ones who may not ever get there is resilience — the ability to bounce back from rejection, failure, shortcoming, continuing on toward your goals despite how difficult they are to achieve.

Resilience is a trait many aspiring writers simply do not have. It doesn’t mean you’ll never develop the trait if you don’t currently have it mastered. But it’s not something that comes naturally to most people. What’s most difficult about building up resilience is that in order to do that — in order to train yourself to withstand hardship — you have to experience hardship. Many, MANY times over.

Which means you have to do everything possible as a writer to fail. Submit work, pitch editors, query agents. Put yourself out there enough times that rejection, even when it hurts, almost becomes part of your routine. You can normalize failure for yourself while still allowing the negative feelings that come with it to course through you.

The difference is that you feel those negative emotions, then let them fuel your next move. Acknowledge that rejection is unfair, then bounce back and keep trying. Over and over and over again.

It’s Not Actually About Being The Best Writer

Here’s a truth nugget for you: You can be an okay writer and still succeed. You can be an excellent writer and still struggle. Becoming an accomplished, successful writer is actually less about the quality of your writing and more about … well, just about everything else.

You have to prove that you can write, of course. You have to constantly exercise that muscle and do your best to improve your craft over time. But any writer, given the resources and space and time that often come with success, can learn to be better than when they started. You just have to get to the point where you have the privilege to work toward getting better. And even if you start out great, that privilege is still necessary to get that great writing in front of more readers.

So while resilience is extremely vital, so is networking (I KNOW, but you hear the advice repeated because it actually does make a difference). And putting yourself out there. Learning to be afraid of failure but choosing to expose yourself to it anyway. Figuring out how to be persistent and prolific without burning out or putting your energy into the wrong things.

It amazes people when I tell them that success in writing has so little to do with actual writing. No one ever told me that as an aspiring writer, so I’m doing you a favor and telling you now. The writing itself matters. But it’s so much more than that.

It may not be fair, but it’s not an impossible industry to navigate. It may not be easy, but if you refuse to allow yourself to give up, you may be able to create a space for yourself in the room where it (sometimes) happens.

Meg Dowell is the creator of Brain Rush, dedicated to helping writers put their ideas into words, and Not a Book Hoarder, celebrating books of all kinds. She is an editor, writer, book reviewer, podcaster, and photographer passionate about stories and how they get made. Learn more