Dear End Goal,

lizshine74by lizshine74

In Letters.

Dear End Goal,

You are  publication, ultimately, but also just desire to have finished the work.

At a recent writer’s group meeting a friend proposed that one of our greatest crutches as writer’s might be impatience. The hallelujahs started in my head at the suggestion. The mouse maze of my own impatience had been really effing things up for me lately.

It doesn’t help that we live in a fast-paced world where not even children are content to spend hours aimlessly wandering their neighborhoods in pursuit of whatever daydreams emerge. Boredom, a place where any end goal seems dangerously out of reach is a necessary step on the path to creation.

What’s the maximum number of drafts you’re willing to write? How long can you sit staring at a blank page before you say fuck-it and go on with the rest of your day? How many different publications are you willing to get rejections from before you stop trying? Are you contemplating self-publishing?

In part, we want to publish so we can finally be done, when we should really want to publish because we’ve walked away from the work, come back to it and felt even after that distance that yes what we’ve written is good and ought to go out into the world.

What I’m trying lately is to work on projects at different levels. Now, I have a story I’m just about ready to send out, a novel I’m reading after putting away for a while and gathering feedback on, and a new draft of a new novel I’m meandering through. The novel I am reading and gathering feedback on I will start editing in the fall.

End-goal, when it comes to writing fiction you need to be flexible and rooted more in the work itself than any outcome in regard to publication, which requires infinite reserves of patience. end goal

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Some past posts to keep you making time: 
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

lizshine74

lizshine74

Liz Shine teaches high school English, writes, edits, and coaches other writers from her home in Olympia, WA. When she begins to feel overwhelmed by it all, she simply looks up at Mount Rainier in the distance and gets back to work. If that fails, she heads to the ocean. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press. Her Substack Make Time is her gift to writers, like her, trying to magic time in this crazy, busy world. All of those posts are cross-posted on the blog here. You can see more of her writing at lizshine.com and find her on Instagram {@lizshine.writer} cooking, traveling, and in other ways seeking moments of awe. She has been an active participant in communities of writers since the early 1990s. She’s learned that two things feel truly purpose-driven in life: writing and coaching other writers. In the in between (because one cannot be driving for a purpose every moment), she enjoys looking for wonder and connection. She is a lifelong yoga student, an enthusiastic walker along streets and trails, and an amateur gardener and vegetarian cook. She lives in Olympia, WA. She believes in the power of practice and has been practicing writing since some time in the early 90s when she became an adult in the rain-soaked city of Aberdeen. Writing began with journaling, as a way to understand a confusing, sometimes violent coming-of-age. She writes mostly fiction, some nonfiction, and poetry, and holds an MFA from Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writers Workshop. She is a founding editor at Red Dress Press.