In life there are times where things are at a sprint. We must get them done as soon as possible. The urgency is critical. So we put in all our might and effort to get done whatever it is as soon as possible. At the end we are exhausted, if not physically, most definitely mentally. Yet, we have a sense of accomplishment for being able to have done it to begin with.
However, what about those things that take a long time to complete like getting a new business up and running? Or maybe a new house? Or in the case of a writer a new novel? Do we want to do these like a sprint? I say no. Only because faster doesn’t always mean better.
In a business, maybe important steps get missed as a result that in the end end up costing the owner more time than if he’d just take the time to do it right to begin with.
Or in building a new house. Maybe shortcuts were taken just to get it built as quickly as possible. As the new home owner starts to live in it all the things that were done quickly now begin to fall apart because the time was taken to begin with to make sure it was done right to begin with.
Or as a writer, is more important to just get words written down on a page and not really know where you are going with it. Whether the writer is someone who has to plot out everything before hand (a plotter) or someone who does it in the moment (a pantser), in the end writing those words down that will get us to the end result in the best way possible is the way to go. It’s important to remember that we don’t need to sprint to the writing finish line. It’s more like a marathon. We need to make our words matter to the best of our ability.
Now I’m not saying that we may end up off in a direction that ends up stopping our forward progress as it’s not working the way we thought. I’m talking about just writing words to write where we haven’t taken the time needs to know our stories. As a beginning writer this probably happens a lot. I think as the writer becomes more and more experience there are less and less rabbit holes they end up going down.
I know someday I will be one of those people. My hope is that I always do the marathon and not the sprint so that in the end my novel will turn out the best it can be.
