Thank you.
Kathleen

“…success isn’t dependent on some gift from God. It’s dependent on effort. And not just the quantity of your effort, but the empowered quality of it.”

This inspired me. I work hard, write for hours and hone my skills. My writing has raw quality, but as you may have read in my comments to folk who read the review I did of your book, your work and mentoring make me feel energised and empowered. That’s why I send folk over here. All I need now is laser focus, and the bravery to cut loose the activities that are preventing me from powering it up.

Thanks, Larry.

Thanks for this. Sometimes it’s hard to push oneself so hard for something that SEEMS like it should be easy. (Just ask any non-writer: Writing? EASY!) But you (and my sports-loving boyfriend) are right on: the odds are rough, but if you wanna play in the big leagues, if you wanna be a pro, an Olympian, then you gotta train, and you gotta practice, and you gotta win.

Me, I refuse to settle for second best. I’m now with a smaller, more dedicated group of writers who are either already published or working obsessively on it!

I think that, between novelists, textbook authors, pro bloggers, web content developers, and the five people still writing stories for newspapers, the number of writers has to be higher than that.

(I looked for census data on the question, but all I found was that there are 2.4M people in “Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations.”)

The message some will take away from this is that you (yes *you*) have about as much chance at being a pro author as you (yes *you*) have of being a pro athlete. After all, the odds are about the same for a random person. Since a lot of us have keen memories of being terrible at sports, this may be more discouragement than is warranted.

But we’re not random people. Anyone who has any aspiration or ambition as a writer is automatically better positioned for success than at least 70% of the population. If you have a bit of aspiration and a bit of raw talent, you’re more likely to succeed than 90% of people.

Yes, there is much hard work to do. I don’t want to detract from that point at all. But when you present the analogy this way, you might remind the listener that, in the analogy, most of us in the audience are at least second stringers on the high school football team.