It occurs to me that every discipline requires you build your stamina. Whether it’s gardening or knitting, gymnastics or playing basketball, accounting or serving as a legal representative, there is some component of the work that requires endurance, repeating the same task over and over again until you build your muscles, or accuracy, or patience, or focus.

During a recent interview, someone asked me what keeps me going, and I said the adventure. Even though I’ve been writing for almost 30 years, I feel like I have turned a new corner on a block called novel-writing. It is a discipline I never had the stamina for. It requires you to return to the page over and over and over and over again for what seems like countless work sessions to get the piece completed.

In my first novel, I started to feel a little broken down at about the third draft. I was hacking my way through and felt like I couldn’t see the end. So I sent a third to the editor. I told her I needed a win, I needed to feel like I was finishing something. I was learning to level up my stamina. I’m taking it as a sign of growth that I’m just getting antsy with this current draft. It is also the third draft (so I’m learning that I get antsy at this point), but I’ve made it to the final third before I started breaking down. I’m getting my endurance up!

There are SO MANY reasons why we have to return to the well over and over again when we are developing a skill. We need to develop structure, voice, craft, instinct—but we also just need to learn how to get it done, to understand how much effort is required, and determine just how many more times we’ll have to take the same action before we cross the finish line.

I’m still in the race!

Onward!