Only Commit to What You'll Complete

How many people on planet earth can scale a plateau without tools? And how many of them without practice? Yet the average author comes out of the gate expecting to write a perennial best-seller, if not a sprawling story multiverse the likes of which it took hundreds of Marvel creators to make (and rather poorly, overall).

Authors like these won’t be authors long. If trying to scale that plateau on the first go doesn’t kill you, it’ll put you off to the whole endeavor right quick. Every time you give up, you send your brain a signal that you should be doing something else. Rack up enough aborted projects, and you’ll stop creating new ones.

If you want to take on big challenges, take on small challenges first. Start with projects you can and will complete. Stop banging your head against the plateau, and make for the foothills quick! Learn to write excellent sentences, paragraphs, scenes. Then try your hand at flash fic, short stories, novellas. Doctors train for a decade to make the big bucks—you can spend a year mastering the basics. And when you’ve proven to yourself that you have, then write that standalone novel, that series, and eventually, that sprawling multiverse you dreamed up.

Make it easy to succeed, and you will.